WeGene - Fri, 21 Sep 2018

WeGene is a Chinese company that up to now has done DNA testing in Shenzhen, China. They have grown to about 300,000 customers. They are going to open a second lab in Hong Kong so they can start offering services abroad. An article a couple of days ago on genomeweb gives more of the details.

Their main site www.wegene.com is in Chinese. They do autosomal testing somewhat akin to what 23andMe does giving you a lot of medical information. The article says that WeGene provides a DNA relatives report. If that is true, then they’d be only the 5th major DNA testing company to do so. (LivingDNA does not yet provide you with your DNA matches) The price they charge for an autosomal test is 499 Chinese Yuan which is about $73 USD.

They have an English site as well at: www.wegene.com/en/

When I saw the boxes at the bottom right to Import 23andMe and AncestryDNA data, I was intrigued. So I created an account and imported my 23andMe data. There was no cost for this.

First I tried the uploading the unzipped .txt file, but WeGene didn’t take it, so you have to upload the .zip file. I then did and it gave me this confirmation message:

I also uploaded my AncestryDNA with the same result. They sent me confirmation emails that look like this:

which translated says:

Hello:
WeGene Customer Service sent you a private message on WeGene Microgene - Focus on Personal Genome Detection and Analysis
———
Dear User, your data Louis Kessler has been updated to our site. The full report will be generated in a few hours. Thanks for your patience.
Please click on the link to continue: https://www.wegene.com/inbox/read/nnnnnn
Please do not reply to this email. This email is not monitored and you will not receive any response. For help, please log in to the website.
WeGene Microgene - Focus on Personal Genome Detection and Analysis

When you click on the link, it takes you to your messages at WeGene where a message has been left that says:

Dear User, your data Louis Kessler has been updated to our site. The full report will be generated in a few hours. Thanks for your patience.

I did a few other things and went back to the site about an hour later to look around and there were haplogroup reports already ready:

The paternal Haplogroup was a mouthful: R1a1a1b2a2b1a.  Now I have never seen it written that way, so I can’t tell you if it is correct or not. I’ve had Big-Y 500 done at Family Tree DNA, and from R1a they put me right into a M198 sub designation so it’s a bit of a different reference notation.

The maternal haplogroup exactly matched my Family Tree DNA mtFull sequence haplogroup of K1a1b1a, so that is definitely good.

The famous people they show in the pictures are from just the top letter of the Haplogroups R and K, which is about as close to me as someone with the same astrological sign. And “The Adams” should be John Adams, and “Mary Streep” should be “Meryl Streep”.  But they obviously are trying to cater to Western cultured customers by including a movie star, journalist and a president all from the United States, to be among the displayed people in the haplogroups.

Then I noticed I had two sets of reports available, likely one for each of my uploads. The second gave the same verbose paternal haplogroup. But it gave a maternal haplogroup of L3. Ann Turner explained this to me on Facebook:

“AncestryDNA (v2 only) has just a couple hundred mtDNA SNPs, and most of those appear to have been selected for their medical relevance. L3 might be the best WeGene can do. All European haplogroups do descend from L3.”

Unfortunately, I had no way of telling which of the two reports was from my 23andMe upload and which was from my AncestryDNA upload. Both are simply listed as: Louis Kessler. So I’ve now changed my name on the test profiles to include the company in parenthesis after my name. I assigned the Ancestry DNA to the one that gave me the L3 maternal haplogroup.

Another hour later and the Ancestry Composition reports appeared. I got these for my 23andMe and AncestryDNA uploads:

So 23andMe gave me 16.53% Ashkenazi and 39.00% Balkan = 55.53% that are ethnically and regionally correct, and AncestryDNA gave 18.64% Ashkenazi and 47.04% Balkan = 65.68% ethnically and regionally correct.  The Middle Eastern when expanded is mostly Egyptian, but for me to be that, you’d have to go back to biblical times.

Other companies I tested with gave me at least 83.8% (at MyHeritage DNA) and as much as 99.2% Ashkenazi (at 23andMe), so I very much doubt the results here from WeGene. What is really unfortunate is that they give the values to two decimal places that seemingly make it look very accurate, when in my case, the values aren’t even close.

What I’d really be interested in is if just from free raw data uploads, they will provide me with my DNA matches. If so, it will be interesting to see if I match to anyone from what is likely a mostly Chinese customer base.

They offer an Application Programming Interface (API) at https://api.wegene.com/ to encourage developers to develop utilities that use their data. The API documentation says you can get access to User Information, raw data information, health risk data, the ancestral information I show above, and a health report. Unfortunately I don’t see anything in it about doing anything with your matches to other people. In fact I don’t see anything at their site about them providing you DNA matches. The only place I have seen that mentioned was in the article I linked to at the top of this post. Hopefully the article is correct.

So the English site only has the Ancestry Analysis and a Pocket DNA menu item that enables you to look at your various health issues. I’m not too interested in that, but you can feel free to explore it if you go there.

I then went to the main Chinese site at www.wegene.com and found that I could log in there as well. Translating the main page gives:

The MyGenes menu item is health info. Community is the discussion forum.

The Explore menu looks more interesting:

It gives:

1. Institute: which is a number of survey questions to fill out so they can correlate your DNA to your characteristics.
2. Micro-Interpretation: which is more health stuff.
3. Application: which is a list of 3rd party applications available that use their API. There are 4 listed:
• GeneU at http://mahui.me/gene/ which seems to compare your DNA with the Chinese population and Chinese and foreign celebrities.
• Hello, Gene! at http://www.gene-disease.cn/ which says it analyzes  gene data disease annotation.
• AW, at http://jz.awuplan.com/WeChat/store/AwuProduct/a1568b5b-8470-4f37-b6a1-a69b00e29162 which seems to have something to do with weight management.
• Relationship Go at: https://relationshipgo.xyz/ which measures your genetic relationship with someone else. The other person must authorize you to be a friend with an invite and acceptance.
4. Surname Outgroup: Shows the distribution of your surnames and places of origin relative to others and gives you historical events and migration information related to them. It says 71,037 people have been involved in this. This is for Chinese people.
5. Genetic Relationships: This is where you enter your family tree and compare yourself to others. It looks like you have to enter the person in the tree and they have to have had a DNA test as well either at WeGene or uploaded there for you to use this.
   
6. Raw Data:  For me, this screen only says: 
   “Only data in wegen format is supported.”

So after I’m seeing this, I’m now suspecting that the article’s reference to a DNA relative report was with respect to this Genetic Relationships function. Unless there’s something I’m not seeing, I believe they’ll only compare DNA of people you put in your tree and you agree to be friends with. So I don’t now believe that they actually give you a list of all your DNA matches. Too bad.

Overall, very interesting. We’ll see what they do when they expand their services outside of China. I’m sure WeGene will be looking at what the other companies are doing and will then work to expand their offerings for people more interested in their genealogical research.