Low-cost personal DNA readings are on the way
By Peter Aldhous,
New Scientist
| 09. 06. 2007
"GENETICS is about to get personal." So proclaims the website of 23andMe, a Californian company that is gearing up to offer people a guided tour of their own DNA. For the superstars of genetics, it has already got personal. Earlier this week, genomics pioneer Craig Venter revealed an almost complete sequence of his genome, while that of James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's double-helix structure, has been available on the web since late June.
Given that Watson's genome took almost $1 million to read, most of us won't immediately be following in his and Venter's footsteps. It isn't necessary to read your entire genome, however, to browse many of the genetic variations that may influence your health. According to George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, the most pertinent information could be gleaned by sequencing the 1 per cent of the genome that codes for proteins. Thanks to the advances in sequencing technology, that might be done for as little as $1000 per person. "DNA chips", meanwhile, can scan your genome for common "spelling mistakes" for...
Related Articles
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 05.14.2024
Photo by Kind and Curious from Unsplash
When Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) published the results of its gene therapy trial for “bubble baby” syndrome it was hailed as a medical breakthrough. The treatment had a more than 95% success...
By Victoria Bisset and Adela Suliman, The Washington Post | 05.09.2024
Photo by CDC from Unsplash
A baby girl born with profound genetic deafness can now hear unaided after receiving a “groundbreaking” gene therapy trial, Britain’s National Health Service said Thursday.
Opal Sandy, an 18-month-old from Oxfordshire, England, is the first...
By Carrie Arnold, Nature Biotechnology | 04.17.2024
Tome Biosciences came out of stealth mode on 12 December with a haul of over $200 million to develop the company’s gene editing platform. Tome’s first order of business was to snap up Replace Therapeutics to expand its toolkit to...
By Charlotte Hu, Vox | 05.06.2024
Medicine has entered a new era in which scientists have the tools to change human genetics directly, creating the potential to treat or even permanently cure diseases by editing a few strands of troublesome DNA. And CRISPR, the gene-editing...