All offspring retain some cells from their mothers for years afterwards. These are living, dividing cells so even adults still have some of their mother’s cells inside of them.
Any biological sample you send to get tested is a confusing mess of thousands of organisms’ DNA, and the way commercial testing companies overcome this is to develop “haploid markers” for only human DNA – and then only count a “hit” when sequencing depth is 40 or more.
That’s right – they’re actually reading your mom’s DNA too but they discard it because it’s a tiny minority of the hits.
I want the Minority Report.
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