Accuracy of Pet DNA Tests Called Into Question After Analysis of Human Sample
When scrolling through adorable animal videos on social media, it seems like many of the accounts who post belong to the pets themselves. I've noticed that most of these accounts allude to both the animal's name and breed in their usernames, but what is an owner to do when they don't know their cat or dog's breed?
Many owners of rescue pets have been curious to try a pet DNA test like Embark or Wisdom Panel to confirm their buddy's breed, and for a good reason. Who wouldn't want to know? Pet DNA tests can give insights to an animal's ancestry, health, and even personality traits--but how accurate are they?
One dog mom from New Hampshire contacted the CBS Boston investigative news team when her rescue dog's DNA test results looked a little fishy. They sent out more tests to see what was up--and even sent swabs of human DNA!
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This is wild! After rescue dog owner Michelle Leininger sent her dog's DNA samples to several other laboratories, she and the @cbsnews team were surprised to see just how different the results were. All tests listed German Shepherd as her main breed, but the secondary breeds, as well as the percentage of each breed, varied greatly. How does this make sense?
There was one more confusing result, too. One of the tests Leininger sent in contained her own cheek cells--but her results somehow matched with a few dog breeds. According to them, she was 40% Border Collie, 32% Cane Corso, and 28% Bulldog!
As commenter @rediculumsapiosapian mentioned, "This makes sense if you know how DNA sequencing works," and they're partially right! One of the pet DNA companies, Embark, explains on their website that after an animal's DNA is split up into thousands of alleles (pieces of genetic coding), it's matched up to the thousands of other DNA samples in the company's system.
In simpler terms, geneticists can't yet determine what DNA sequences determine different breeds in animals. What they can do is compare each sample in great detail with DNA samples from animals of different species to see which have sequences that match. Remember--every company's sample set will be different!
Dog DNA and human DNA aren't the same, but they can be sequenced the same way. It's still a mystery why Leininger's samples weren't met with an error message, however. Do with this information what you will!
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