Now the secrets of the human genome have been laid bare, it's about time someone offered a personal genome scanning service.

You post off a blood sample, and a fee, and the service sequences your entire genome (including 'junk', just in case it's not really junk after all) and sends it back on a CD (or puts it on a website to download).

Privacy is preserved, since they don't know who you are (anonymous payment scheme permitting). Once you have your genome on disk, you can run diagnostic tests against it on your PC, as and when they become available. You could also check your compatibility with potential breeding partners, as regards lethal recessives.
-- Mickey the Fish, Jul 13 2000

Human Genome FAQ http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/faq/faqs1.html
Source of my anno. [pottedstu, Dec 12 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]

"Race for the $1000 genome is on" http://www.newscien...s.jsp?id=ns99992900
New Scientist article [Loris, Oct 04 2004]

CATGee: your dna in a tin http://www.catgee.com/catgee/control/home
Not quite the same thing, but this British company will store a DNA sample on a card and send you a digital fingerprint of it for display or storage. Only USD $30. [krelnik, Oct 04 2004]

Um... what makes you think somebody isn't already scheming along these lines? It's almost inevitable, I think.
-- Foxsong, Nov 26 2000


I'd do it if they let me copyleft the results of the survey.
-- LoriZ, Jun 18 2001


very clever link, egnor. Made me realise the futility of work. I'm going to go home now and acrylic-paint some sausages.
-- lewisgirl, Jun 20 2001


You'd get bulk discounts for family too as they'd have a lot of similarity - knowing Mum and Dad's analyses would mean that less processing time wold be needed for the kids.

Once the sequence had been done,then a program would go through it throwing out the diagnostics of tissue type, MHC type, prob of various diseases, etc., datamining/matching with existing sequences. All this is then put on the web site and available to GP/medics.
-- mkirksmith, Dec 12 2001


The human genome comprises about 3 billion bases, each which can have one of 4 values. That works out as about 750 megabytes, which would fit nicely on a CD. In practice, the large amount of duplicated DNA should mean that this could be compressed significantly.
-- pottedstu, Dec 12 2001


Croissant, just for the "CD of granddad" idea.
-- sam, Dec 13 2001


The human haploid genome is ~3*10^9 bases.
You have two of these.
You'd also need a little bit of information about the lengths of the chromosomes, and also (ideally) methylation information. If you really compressed it down using a custom routine, I guess you'd still be able to get it onto a CD, since as noted it is decidedly non-random. However, I wouldn't fancy trying to decompress that archive.

Then of course you'd need software to do anything interesting with it.

Would you charge women slightly more since they have two X chromosomes rather than one X and one (smaller) Y?

Anyway, this isn't original, see link.
-- Loris, Nov 11 2002



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