racial DNA tests accurate?

Question:I'm asking this because I'm very interested in taking one of those tests to see where my heritage and percentages lie. While I know I'm mostly Caucasian/European mutt, I have Puerto Rican from my dad's side (about 45%), and because I'm really not in contact w/ his family and they really don't know too much themselves about it, I'm interested in seeing where exactly my roots go (to see if I have any Taino Indian, African, Indigenous or Spaniard blood or if it is a mixture).

So are they really accurate? And what are some reputable sites for such (I googled it and I'm unsure which ones are accurate and which ones aren't). I've seen dnaancestryproject.com and www.genetic-identity.com/Ancestry Testing, but I'm still unsure.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I'm asking this because I'm very interested in taking one of those tests to see where my heritage and percentages lie. While I know I'm mostly Caucasian/European mutt, I have Puerto Rican from my dad's side (about 45%), and because I'm really not in contact w/ his family and they really don't know too much themselves about it, I'm interested in seeing where exactly my roots go (to see if I have any Taino Indian, African, Indigenous or Spaniard blood or if it is a mixture).

So are they really accurate? And what are some reputable sites for such (I googled it and I'm unsure which ones are accurate and which ones aren't). I've seen dnaancestryproject.com and www.genetic-identity.com/Ancestry Testing, but I'm still unsure.

Yes they are extremely accurate...there was an interesting PBS special on African Americans taking them like Oprah Chris Tucker etc....they found some very interesting results most had alot of European ancestry. I am interested in one also..I am a mutt also and wonder where all my roots lie. Oprahs were half Native American even though she heard it was a rumor Ironically Henry Gates Jr found 75% of his DNA was European not AFRICAN. Chris tuckers roots were form Angola and he actually went there...A Puerto rican study foudn some interesting results of unlike the Dominican Republic they still had much of their Taino DNA intact like Trinidadians.. Even though the European was only minimal compared to the African DNA.

This is an expert of what these researcher did find.
""According to the study funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have Amerindian mitochondrial DNA, 27 percent have African and 12 percent Caucasian. (Nuclear DNA, or the genetic material present in a gene's nucleus, is inherited in equal parts from one's father and mother. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from one's mother and does not change or blend with other materials over time.)

In other words a majority of Puerto Ricans have Native blood. ""
the patriarchal DNA of Ricans found that Europeanan in the 70% percentile range DNA was dominant with African about 30% range coming in second and Taino third with a mere 6% average.

Yes but you can still hire someone like Johnny Cochran to finagle and get around the truth with tricks especially if you have a whole lot of money to pay for it.

Here is a site:
http://www.familytreedna.com/

I'm not sure if you will get the detailed results your looking for. They can connect you with a haplogroup but it will show that you come from a general area. Not a lot of detail.

They are accurate to the degree of accuracy that is presented with the results as associated with the claim being made from the results.

To say they are accurate (or not) is kind of meaningless. As far as determining the makeup of the particular genetic structure they are looking at - they are extremely accurate.

In establishing paternity (or other legal issues), they aren't accurate enough to OWN THEIR OWN be acceptable as "proof". There must be other supporting evidence. One example I like to give is that if a DNA test is performed on a child and the mother immediately after birth, the determination (through DNA testing) that the mother is actually the mother is 99.993% accurate (ignoring testing errors, contamination, etc.). What that means is that 7 out of 100,000 [correction - my initial submission mistakenly said 10,000] randomly selected people would give the same results. But clearly those 7 random people ARE NOT the mother.

But true, legitimate DNA evaluations always come with a confidence measure (if it doesn't, I would throw away the results because without it, any number is meaningless).

The second problem is the accuracy of the database the results are compared against for a specific analysis purpose.

What you often get (of course presented with pages and pages of way cool graphs, highly scientific genetic terms, etc.) boils down to "within the last 0 to 14 generations, it is "likely" that you have a (male/female/any) ancestor from a specific (region/ethnic group).

But if you dig through the heavy scientific presentation (makes it look really high tech), what you will find is that based on some database derived from often unknown sources of information, that given the particular marker they found, there is a 48% chance you came from Region 1, 20% chance from region 2, 8% chance from region 3, 4% chance from region 4, etc.

So absolutely it is more likely that you came from region 1 as opposed to any other region of the world. However, if you do the math, it is actually more likely that you came from somewhere OTHER than that specific region (52% to 48%). Just more likely to have come from region 1 than any other single specific region.

But depending on the purpose of the results, and the results of the test itself, the accuracy level may be quite sufficient. This is especially true when used with other forms of "evidence".

The best summary of the accuracy of DNA testing can be shown in the legal world. Many, many, many people have been proved innocent by DNA testing. Yet not one single person has ever been found guilty of a crime (or paternity) SOLELY by DNA evidence.