Category: Personal genomics
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$99 for 1 million markers
Looks like 23andMe has a new $99 price point. If so, that’s 100 markers per cent! (here’s the press release) 1) Privacy: Yes, this a privacy risk. 23andMe is fundamentally an IT company, and IT companies mess up. But I am confident that within 10-15 years genetic information is going to be pretty easy to…
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$99 for 1 million markers
Looks like 23andMe has a new $99 price point. If so, that’s 100 markers per cent! (here’s the press release) 1) Privacy: Yes, this a privacy risk. 23andMe is fundamentally an IT company, and IT companies mess up. But I am confident that within 10-15 years genetic information is going to be pretty easy to…
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Is Daniel MacArthur ‘desi’?
My initial inclination in this post was to discuss a recent ordering snafu which resulted in many of my friends being quite peeved at 23andMe. But browsing through their new ‘ancestry composition’ feature I thought I had to discuss it first, because of some nerd-level intrigue. Though I agree with many of Dienekes concerns about…
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Can your genes be patented?
Court to Decide if Human Genes Can Be Patented. So it seems a group of middle aged to very aged lawyers will decide the decades long Myriad Genetics saga. My position on this issue is simple: if you are going to award patents, they must be awarded to acts of engineering, not discoveries of science.…
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Back to crunching personal genomic data
Many months ago I told some of my friends that I’d run analyses of their 23andMe data, and report it back to them. A year ago I made the same promise to some of my readers. But life got in the way, and I’ve been very busy. I’m working on scripts to make the whole…
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It takes a village, and guidelines
A week ago I posted on a rather scary case of medical doctors withholding information from a family because they felt that it was in the best interests of the family. I objected mostly because I don’t have a good feeling about this sort of patern…
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It takes a village, and guidelines
A week ago I posted on a rather scary case of medical doctors withholding information from a family because they felt that it was in the best interests of the family. I objected mostly because I don’t have a good feeling about this sort of patern…
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A golden age of sibling comparisons
Image credit: Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full Siblings I really love the paper Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full S…
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One girl, one exome
Interesting story in The San Jose Mercury News, Open-source science helps San Carlos father’s genetic quest: “We used materials that are public, freely available,” said Rienhoff, a physician and scientist, as Beatrice frolicked nearby…
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One girl, one exome
Interesting story in The San Jose Mercury News, Open-source science helps San Carlos father’s genetic quest: “We used materials that are public, freely available,” said Rienhoff, a physician and scientist, as Beatrice frolicked nearby…
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GEDmatch needs funds!
I noticed today that GEDmatch is trying to raise funds to cover the cost of their web services. What are those services? Basically if you get raw data back from direct-to-consumer genotyping firms GEDmatch allows you to run further analytics. You can d…
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AncestryDNA is now accepting the necessity of raw data downloads
The Legal Genealogist points me to the fact that AncestryDNA is now going to work on allowing users to download their data. Here’s the specific section: AncestryDNA believes that our customers have the right to their own genetic data. It is your …
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Dienekes and ADMIXTOOLS
Less than a month ago I pointed to the release of ADMIXTOOLS. Unfortunately, though I have a desktop at home devoted purely to my personal genomic hobbies I haven’t been able to free up the time on weekends to start doing my own analysis. This is…
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Fear not the gene!
John Hawks points me to a critique of NPR coverage of personal genomics. In defense of NPR they seem like Physical Review Letters in comparison to other media, such as the BBC. But I do wonder what the causality here is. Does the media lead us to the p…
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I am free of rare homozygous recessives! (well, perhaps)
I got a notification today from Ian Logan that he set up a page on my genotype using a method which detects rare homozygous SNPs in the ~1 million markers I put up from my 23andMe results. My raw data is online, so anyone can analyze it. Here is the su…
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Ancestry.com’s AncestryDNA won’t give you your raw data
CeCe Moore points me to an “interesting” fact I had not noticed about Ancestry.com‘s AncestryDNA service (which is not open available to everyone right now): I re-emphasized to John the importance to the genetic genealogy community th…
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The ecstasy and agony of prenatal information
Slate reposts a piece from New Scientist, Do You Really Want To Know Your Baby’s Genetics? It is arranged as a series of questions which might arise from the new information. For me my frustration with this sort of discussion is rooted in reviewing o…
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Consent and genomics
Interesting story in The New York Times, Genes Now Tell Doctors Secrets They Can’t Utter: One of the first cases came a decade ago, just as the new age of genetics was beginning. A young woman with a strong family history of breast and ovarian cancer…
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Beware of the ancient of days!
By now you have probably read in The New York Times, or on the blogs, about the new paper in Nature which reports on the empirical trend toward the children of older fathers carrying more de novo mutations. Really all you need is this figure: It’…
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Yes we should (prenatal sequencing)
Obsession. I’ve been obsessed with many things in my life, from specific women to sundry topics. But I’ve never known obsession until I had a child. Perhaps others are not like me, but the monomaniacal need to know as much as you can about …