MyHeritage DNA Matching is Now Live!

In May of this year, MyHeritage gave users who had taken a DNA test the ability to upload DNA data to benefit from free DNA matching (after MyHeritage had completed developing it). Now, MyHeritage has announced that DNA Matching technology is ready and live!

MyHeritage compares DNA data of individuals, which has been uploaded to the MyHeritage website, in order to find matches based on shared DNA. Your DNA matches are people who are highly likely to be relatives (close or distant) because there are significant similarities between their DNA and yours.

DNA Matching can open up exciting new research directions. It can also help MyHeritage users to find and connect with relatives that they may not have known about.

MyHeritage is offering their DNA Matching for free for those who have already uploaded their DNA test results to MyHeritage. Other users who have taken a DNA test (from providers such as Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, or Ancestry) or who have DNA test results from other family members, and who have not uploaded those results to MyHeritage DNA Matching can still do so. MyHeritage recommends that you hurry and upload those results so you can enjoy free DNA Matching on MyHeritage forever.

All people share about 99.5% of their DNA sequence in common, and only within the remaining 0.5% are the genetic differences that make people different from one another. These differences are expressed in the order of genetic information called base pairs along a strand of DNA. Current DNA technologies used for genealogy are not a full sequence of the entire genome. Instead, they focus on specific locations in the genome that are known to be highly variable and part of the differentiating 0.5%.

MyHeritage has created and refined the capability to read the DNA data files that people can export from all main vendors and bring them to the same common ground. (The process is called imputation). Thanks to this capability, MyHeritage can successfully match the DNA of an Ancestry customer (using the recent version 2 chip) with the DNA of a 23andMe customer (using their current chip, which is version 4). That’s just one example of what MyHeritage DNA Matching can do.

MyHeritage will notify MyHeritage users if a DNA match has been found. In some cases, it will be possible to contact the person that a user matches and discover how the two of them are related to each other.

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