What does a "no call" result mean?

Under rare circumstances, a dog tested with Embark might have a “no call” result for a given health condition or trait. To ensure accuracy, we use multiple probes for each gene that we know to be associated with a genetic health condition (a probe is a small sequence of single-stranded DNA that allows us to find the complementary strand in your dog’s DNA sample). 

Most often, these multiple probes will “agree” with each other. However, once in a while, either due to sample quality or other factors, our probes do not agree, which means that we cannot confidently determine a dog’s genetic status at a given location. We do not want to report a result that we are not confident in, so these discordant results are displayed as “no call” or “no result” on our website. 

“No calls” have no impact on other results.

Sometimes when “no call” results are reviewed manually by our bioinformatics team, we are able to provide a definitive result. If we cannot be confident, then the dog would need to be re-swabbed in order to receive that specific result. 

Please note that we can offer No Call reviews for health conditions and Traits for dogs that are actively being bred. Please reach out to our Customer Support team if you would like us to manually review a result.