Avuncular tests calculate the likelihood of relatedness between a child and an aunt or uncle.
A child inherits exactly half of their genes from their biological father and the biological father shares around half of his genes in common with his full sibling, therefore the child will share around half of its paternal genes in common with the full sibling of the biological father. Based upon the number of genetic matches, the laboratory calculates the statistical likelihood that the alleged aunt/uncle is biologically related to the child versus being unrelated.
It may not be possible to achieve a conclusive result. Even though the siblings may have the same biological parents, the alleged father is not genetically identical to the alleged sibling and have different genetic markers. On the average, testing an alleged father’s full sibling allows us to determine only half of his genes.
To increase the certainty of the results, testing the mother of the child is strongly recommended, as this allows for identify genetic markers of the child that were inherited maternally and to eliminate them from consideration as possible paternal markers.
All our avuncular tests utilize stringent, validated testing procedures and include up to 22 STR loci plus the gender identification marker amelogenin in order to achieve 100% accurate results.
