And Finally...

973 readers

204 users here now

A place for odd or quirky world news stories.

Elsewhere in the Fediverse:

Rules:

Be excellent to each other
The Internet will resurface old "And finally..." material. Just mark it [VINTAGE]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Pet DNA testing company in doghouse after identifying human as canine (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/895673

DNA My Dog received human genetic sample and identified it as a malamute, shar-pei and labrador, according to news station

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They also don't report the confidence of their results. DNA tests, even the kind used for forensics in criminal investigations, don't give perfect results, there's always some uncertainty. I think there are probably a lot of instances where they have a very low confidence in the results but send them out anyway.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

As of today, it is impossible to report an accurate confidence value for these kinds of analyses. The required theoretical work has not been done yet, and of course may turn out impossible. However, there are tons of ways to estimate confidence.

One of the other companies cited in the article seems to be a bit better about this. They seem to filter out non-dog DNA, and if there is not enough dog DNA left after this, then they report that the sample was bad.