Category: Personal genomics
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23andMe discount code (again)
At this point if you have spare cash why not shell out $300 for a raw copy of your genotype? (yes, I know 23andMe provides other services) I’m sure many readers spend $100 on nice meals now and then. That’s one day. Your genotype won’…
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Regulate the diet industry!
Brandom Keim leaves this comment: It’s easy to see genomic data regulation in romantic narrative terms — The plucky little guys who want to be free! The big, bad institutions who want to control them! — and it’s also a trap. Interpreting genomi…
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Genetic counseling and conflict of interest
Article in The New York Times: Genetic testing raises some vexing ethical questions, like whether it will cause unnecessary anxiety or lead to more medical procedures, including abortions. Now, as the number of tests and the money to be made from them …
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Toward healthier gestations
Neuroskeptic has a post up, The Coming Age of Fetal Genomics: So they don’t. Instead, they buy a $100 test kit, they each provide a small blood sample and send it off to one of the companies offering fetal genome testing. At the testing lab, they…
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Paternity before birth
Before Birth, Dad’s ID. Nothing too surprising, if you can check for fetal abnormalities, it shouldn’t be too hard to ascertain paternity. Two issues of note in the piece. In the specific cases highlighted the author and the sources emphasized …
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Eugenics by another name
Evolution’s winner. Real headline. In the mid-2000s two British biologists of some public note attempted to revive or resuscitate the good name of eugenics, Richard Dawkins and Armand Leroi. My own suspicion is that this emerges in part from a …
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Genome sequencing of the unborn
Noninvasive Whole-Genome Sequencing of a Human Fetus: Analysis of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma holds promise for the development of noninvasive prenatal genetic diagnostics. Previous studies have been restricted to detection of fetal trisomie…
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The current bias in genealogical databases
As a follow up to my post below on the thick coverage of European information in genealogical and genomic databases, here are the “Ancestry Finder” matches from 23andMe for my daughter using the default settings: If I increase sensitivity …
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Science, the genealogical leveler?
I follow CeCe Moore’s blog posts on scientific genealogy pretty closely. But it’s more because of my interest in personal genomics broadly, rather than scientific genealogy as such. My own knowledge of my family’s past beyond the lev…
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GEDmatch
For genetic genealogy buffs, I highly recommend Gedmatch. It’s been rolling out a lot of new features, including ancestry inference tools from the major genome bloggers. Here is my “chromosome paining” using Zack Ajmal’s referen…
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Genetics and genomics projects galore!
Thought I would pass these on. A graduate student at Rice is trying to raise some funds for research, Genopolitics: Your Genes Affect How You Vote!. The methodology is a twin study: To test this, I’ll track how genes affect attitudes during the 2…
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The oracle of personal genomics
The Awl had a rather unoriginal piece up recently, Everything I Didn’t Learn From Taking A Personal Genome Test (this is part of a genre which will probably crest in the next few years, before widespread genotyping becomes common, demystifying t…
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Your child’s genome before the 2nd trimester?
A long piece in Slate, Will Gattaca come True?: When Lo licensed his technology to Sequenom, he stipulated that it could not be used for sex selection. Rabinowitz says Natera won’t test for sex at this point, either. But how long such provisions will…
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Her identity by descent made flesh
As I have indicated before, my daughter has a family tree where everyone out to 0.25 coefficient of relatedness has been genotyped by 23andMe. This is convenient in many ways. Before, relatedness was a theory. Now relatedness can be ascertained on the …
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Elizabeth Warren, Native American
Elizabeth Warren, Native American It has come to my attention that Elizabeth Warren, who is running for a Senate seat in Massachusetts, claims Native American ancestry. This did not surprise me. Warren is from Oklahoma, where nearly 10% of the popul…
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One baby, alone on a PCA island
A week ago I reported that according to 23andMe I’m 40% Asian, and she is 8% Asian (in the future if I say “she” without explanation, you know of whom I speak). Obviously something is off here. The situation resolved itself when I tu…
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The world is as it should be in personal genomics
I’ve been having some fun with my daughter’s personal genomics. You see, she has her whole pedigree out to r = 1/4. So, for example, contributions from her grandparents seem to be about on this order: Paternal grandfather = 0.28 Paternal gr…
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Mike Snyder profile in Science
Examining His Own Body, Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks: Over a 14-month period, the molecular geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, analyzed his blood 20 different times to pluck out a wide variety of biochemical data depicting the status of his body’s immune system, metabolism, and gene activity. In today’s issue…
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Parkinson’s disease patients & free 23andMe
Michelle tipped me off to 23andMe’s new initiative to get Parkison’s disease sufferers genotyped. Basically, if you are a sufferer, you get the service for free. The goal presumably to increase the sample size so as to pick up new possible associations. But a question: can you think of a downside for Parkinson’s disease sufferers?…
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Loss-of-function & variation in load
Greg Cochran pointed out something that I’d been considering about the MacArthur et al. paper: if the average human (OK, non-African human) has ~100 loss-of-function variants, then the standard deviation should be ~10. That’s because the distribution is presumably poisson, and variance = mean, and the square root of the of the variance (~100) is the…