Update: 23andMe's New v3 Chip Results Are In

Today there is a lot of excitement in the personal genomics community because 23andMe's eagerly awaited v3 results are finally coming in. The customers receiving their results today are ones who bought their kits near the beginning of the last holiday sale. Making it even more exciting is that, according to 23andMe, they are loading thousands of data sets today in this first round. Apparently, they had a very good response to the last sale. This is very good news for customers who are interested in the ancestry aspects of their genetic scans. Judging from this, over the next month, the number of potential "cousins" should jump substantially from the approximately 60,000 records already in their database.

So far, my health results, Ancestry Painting and U5b1b2 mtDNA haplogroup assignment look identical to my v2 results. I am still waiting for my Relative Finder and Ancestry Finder to load. However, I am hearing that some customers have revised and, apparently, improved Ancestry Paintings as well as updated haplogroup assignments.

Giving a little insight into what changes we can expect, Michelle K from 23andMe posted this in the 23andMe Forums on January 19th:

"The first batch of v3 results will become available by the end of this week. Please note that v2 data will not be overwritten by v3 data, rather the two will be merged into one data file. Here are some changes you can expect to see:

RelFinder and Family Inheritance: The Relative Finder algorithm has been updated. Customers who upgrade to v3 may notice small changes to their percentages DNA shared or segment locations in Family Inheritance. Existing, not-yet-upgraded customers may also see small changes to their results as their relatives upgrade.

Ancestry Painting: The Ancestry Painting algorithm has been updated. Upgrading customers may notice small changes to their percentages. Existing, not-yet-upgraded customers will not be affected.

Haplogroups: Upgraded v3 customers may see a slight change in their haplogroup due to updated haplogroup trees and v3 compatibility. The change, if any, should be very minor -- only affecting resolution and not affecting major group assignments. All other existing customers will have their haplogroups recomputed on the new trees later this year. This means, for example, if a child is analyzed on v3 and their parent is on v2, they may have different haplogroup assignments.
Raw data: Upgraded v3 customers may have data for v2 SNPs they previously had no-calls for, if the SNP is on v3 and it yielded data. A complete list of v3 SNPs is expected to be available in the Mendel example profiles by mid-February."

I will be posting all week with updates about the new v3 results, so stay tuned...