5 ms·

Home lab, or even be able to sequence your genome at home, privately and securely without risking giving your genetic information to companies like 23andme

• potsandpans 3y ago
  Forgive me, I'm just totally ignorant here. In order to sequence your own genome and do something like 23andme, I kinda just guessed that you'd need some kind of existing corpus and database to derive meaning from the results. Is that true? And if so, is it all open source or free? It's something that's kind of interesting to me. I really enjoyed biotech and chemistry in HS but ended up going in a different direction. If this is something that you can just get into now as a hobby maybe I'll jump down the rabbithole
  • greazy 3y ago
    Nearly everything in this space is OSS. From the aligners to the assembly and the databases. Last I checked 23andMe didn't perform whole genome sequencing but looked at some number of point mutations. It depends on what information you want. Eg for the sake of interest of actional genomics data.
    • mfld 3y ago
      While it's true that most of the tools for genomics are OSS, there is some good software and in particular some databases that are commercial and quite pricey. And the sequencing machines and chemicals also don't come cheap, as the market has long been dominated by one vendor.