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When 23andMe offered a few select clients the opportunity to have the protein-encoding portion of their genome sequenced, Gabe Rudy jumped at the chance. On Wednesday, he walked strangers through the results. His conclusion: most detected genetic “variants of interest” are either not variants or not interesting. “Clinics beware,” he writes in a blog post detailing the analysis.
The standard service offered by 23andMe (based in Mountain View, California) does not sequence people’s DNA but instead probes for common variants, then lists these variants with an analysis of health, ancestry and other information, such as whether you carry a variant more often found in people who find that cilantro tastes soapy.
The exome sequence contained no such information, says Rudy; it was simply a list of ‘variant calls’ or differences that had been found between the sequenced individual and the reference genome. There are several research software pipelines available to call variants. 23andMe used what is probably the most popular one, which is available from the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
An executive at DNA analysis company...
The standard service offered by 23andMe (based in Mountain View, California) does not sequence people’s DNA but instead probes for common variants, then lists these variants with an analysis of health, ancestry and other information, such as whether you carry a variant more often found in people who find that cilantro tastes soapy.
The exome sequence contained no such information, says Rudy; it was simply a list of ‘variant calls’ or differences that had been found between the sequenced individual and the reference genome. There are several research software pipelines available to call variants. 23andMe used what is probably the most popular one, which is available from the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
An executive at DNA analysis company...