Some laboratories may give false exclusion results due to sample mix-ups, contamination, or simply a less comprehensive testing battery.

A false exclusion is a paternity test result that inaccurately states that the tested man is not the biological father of the child. There are three primary causes of false exclusion results: sample mix-ups, sample contamination, and an inadequate sample testing battery. Beta Paternity has safeguards to protect against all of these.

• In a sample mix-up, the DNA samples from one test are inadvertently mixed with the DNA samples from another test—for example, the alleged father’s sample from one paternity test is accidentally tested against the child’s sample from another test.

• Sample contamination occurs when the integrity of a tested party’s DNA sample is degraded or compromised by an unintended environmental influence.

• A less comprehensive sample testing battery proves inadequate when a tested party’s DNA profile reveals a mutation.

Any of these three factors—sample mix-up, sample contamination, or genetic mutation—could produce a false exclusion result because they can all cause the DNA markers between the alleged father’s and the child’s genetic profiles to not match. When enough of the markers are non-matches, the tested father is excluded as the biological father of the child.

Beta Paternity has developed various measures to protect against the reporting of false exclusions.

One of these measures is that two independent teams perform every paternity test we do. They carefully divide the samples into two groups, perform separate tests on them, and compare their results at the end to ensure they match.

In addition, Beta Paternity has an extended testing battery that our scientists can use for cases involving genetic mutation. While we typically examine 16 DNA markers in our paternity tests, we can perform extended testing if we detect an abnormality such as a mutation.

Together, these safeguards help us ensure that our results are 100% accurate.