Do you like Superkits or have you heard of Superkits and thought, "well, that's going
to be super if I can use one of those. But I haven't tested with lots of places." Well,
today we are going to talk about why you can't use siblings to create a Superkit. Now,
this is the question that has actually come up quite often. Particularly, when people have
tested and they've had their brothers and sisters tested as well. And they want to make a Superkit
that those tests. So, today let's dive into why you can't use siblings to create a Superkit.
First off, we need to understand what a Superkit is. A Superkit is a combination of different
companies SNPs. So, for instance, if you tested with 23andMe and then you test with Ancestry. You
tested with MyHeritage. A Superkit is actually taking all three of those tests and combining
them into one. For instance, let's take a look at this table right here. We can see that each
one of these companies tests at different sites. Now, some of those sites are the same, but some of
them are different. Some of them may be unique to that one company. Others of them there might be a
couple of companies that test at that site. With this, none of these companies test any more than
five of these sites even though there's eight sites that I've listed right here.
However, by making a Superkit, what you can see on the end here, is that it has taken the results
from each one of these companies and combine them into one result. And that has some advantages.
Namely, you're going to be able to match people more precisely because you have more information
available. Alright, so, if we take our siblings, then we come up with a slightly different result.
Here, I have me and my brothers that have tested all at different sites. And so, it seems a little
bit similar to this, in that they match in some places and they don't match in others. But
remember, me and each one of my brothers we each have a unique combination. So, at site number one,
you can see I have an AAA. But my brother -number one - he has an A T at that site. Whereas Brother
Number 3, he has an AAA like me. Likewise we go to 2, I have a GT. But my Brother Number 2,
he has a GG at that site. Now, these differences are not because we've tested at different
companies. There are differences because we have different DNA. And we can go down the list and
see that there are differences throughout. Now, if we combined all of these, what you can see
on the Superkit column is that we have some big problems. Remember, each one of these locations,
we're only supposed to have two letters. But with several of these, our Superkit has three letters.
And in one case, here, we actually have four letters. In order to make all the combinations
that we see just between me and my brothers. Now, these are not possible. What these would do,
I don't know as far as messing up any kind of algorithm because all the algorithms are
based on the fact that you have two letters in each spot. Another thing to point out is
what we're actually creating is not a Superkit of one person. But we're creating a Superkit of four
different people. Now, those four different people happen to have the same parents, but there's still
four different people. And so, the results from that Superkit are not going to be the same as
what the Superkit was intended for and how the algorithms use it. So, you may be asking, "well,
what if we all tested from the same company?" So, I've got that here as well here's the same
for people tested at the same company at those same locations. Now, you'll notice then that we
are missing three, six, and seven because Ancestry doesn't test at those locations. But when we also
look at the Superkit we actually haven't improved anything. In fact, we've made some things worse.
You can see now that there's really only one spot here that has the two letters. And that is spot
number five, everything else has three letters a couple of spots. Now, have four letters which
again is is bad because it is going to not allow the algorithms to work the way they need to to
match. Likewise, you're not going to be matching appropriately. Because if I have an AC and
my brother too has an AC, we're gonna match the same people at that spot. However,
my Brother 1, he's got an AAA there and my Brother 3 has a CC there. Well, they're not
going to match people at that spot. But if we put something like this together in the Superkit,
the algorithm may say that, "oh, yeah. Brother 3 and Brother 1, they match this person at this
spot," when they don't. They clearly don't. So, let's take a look at the Superkits of these three
together. The first column here is the real Superkit. This is what we would expect if me
tested between Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Family Tree DNA. That is what a Superkit should look
like. Now, if we have this sibling Superkit that we've created, it does not look the same. You can
see that we have those extra letters there. That is going to confuse the algorithm. It's going to
give you some false matches. And then we have the third one, the siblings that are all tested from
the same company, and again it's actually going to end up with worse results probably than just the
siblings testing with different companies does. Simply because there is a lot of data that is just
not correct. For those of you that have done some different work on GEDmatch, you may be remembering
that there is a way to phase your kits. So, for instance, we can take your DNA and split it up
into the paternal side and the maternal side. You might be asking, "well, what if I actually took my
me and my siblings and we phased it to create a Superkit of the paternal side or the maternal
side?" This sounds an awful lot like a Lazarus kit. But we'll talk about that here in a second.
Let's take a look at what the results could be. So, here we have me and my three siblings. We
all tested at Ancestry and we've divided this up into the paternal and maternal side. And I'm
just looking at the paternal side. And so, you can see we only have one letter for each one because I
only got one of those letters from my father and each one of them also got one of those letters
from their father. Now, when we're looking at this we can combine stuff together knowing that
there's just going to be two letters if we see two different letters. Like, for instance, in line one
or line two, there are some A's and there are some T's. Or there's some G's and there's some T's. We
know that both of those have to be present in this Superkit which is going to representative of our
father. So, we have AT and GT there. However, when we get down to something like number five,
we see T's all the way across. Now, we could have all just inherited a T
because that's all he had to give. He was TT or he might have been some other letter in T. But we
just inherited the T side. We don't know which one it is. So, in this case, we really can just put a
T there. Now, if you had a lot of kids and it was all showing up as one letter, you probably could
make the assumption that it is TT in this case. But the number of kids that you would have to have
to confidently say that, I would guess is probably in the neighborhood of
six to ten. And even then, there's going to be some cases where you're incorrect. And when
we're talking about looking at 500,000 places, even a small chance of being incorrect is going
to result in a large number of incorrect calls on these letters. Now, if we look at the other
way that we each tested from a different company we can see that one we get data on each one of
these locations, but we don't necessarily get complete data. So, for instance, on line one,
we determined that it was a T. And we can see from testing with different companies that it
is also a T, because we have that much difference and enough people tested with or the each of the
companies tested that SNP specifically to give us that. However, once we get to Number 2, we just
have GT when we tested in the same company. But when we test from different companies, because
the person who had the T. that SNP wasn't tested. All we know is that it is at least a G there. So,
testing with different companies to be careful to create this Superkit of our father is similar, but
it's not the same. Now, I mentioned before that the results of this Superkit- it really should
be a Lazarus kit for the parents of siblings if you're using the phased kit data. And if you've
watched my videos about Lazarus kits, you'll notice that face kits of siblings get really
good Lazarus results. But when you actually break it down, those results look like one of these
two. Where there's going to be some letters that are only have one in that location, as opposed
to two in that location. And there's already the Lazarus tool for it. So, then the question is is,
"why can't I just use phase kits on the Superkit tool and create a Lazarus kit?" Well,
when you go to the Superkit tool in GEDmatch, and you click on four different people, it is
going to tell you right away that, "hey, these four kits have to be the same individual." So,
you can't use four different people to create the Superkit. Not only that, you can't even use phase
kits or Lazarus kits as one of your kits. So, even if you could use four different individuals,
it still wouldn't let you use the phased kits. Which is what you would need to use in order to
get good data on the Superkit. So, if you haven't tested at multiple companies, unfortunately,
you're not going to be able to make a Superkit. But you can still go and test at multiple
companies and upload that data to GEDmatch and be able to use that Superkit function. Now,
if you'd like to learn more about matching with Superkits, then check out this video up here.