Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to make an open-source, home ancestry test? Assuming that all the necessary data is there, which equipment would you need to sequence your DNA?
Somewhat off-topic: Instead of dealing with these companies, what equipment and software would I need to do my own DNA testing at home? Has anyone written any open source applications that can interpret this data?
I'd be only interested in this stuff when we can do our own dna readouts at home and compare it against population level statistics that have been published publicly by researchers
I've been wary about submitting my DNA to a company so this is very intriguing. Is there enough data and/or a community and open software to support things like ancestry and disease profiles locally?
Oh, no, sorry, I'm only interested in testing for health reasons. It would indeed be fairly useless for genology except I guess to get a real picture of your overall heritage.
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
If you are willing to let your DNA be publicly available online, check out George Church's Harvard-affiliated Personal Genome Project: http://www.personalgenomes.org/
The goal is to have a dataset of free and open genomic data so that scientists can analyze freely and avoid commercial silos of data.
They will sequence your entire genome for free, subject to a backlog caused by funding shortages.
I think you can pay $1,000 to jump to the head of the line. You may also be able to jump to head of the line if you meet certain "interesting" criteria, like willing to have multiple folks in your family get sequenced. Haven't looked into this in a while, so you'll need to check and verify this paragraph.
As someone in the biological field, I personally don’t trust ancestry DNA tests, but I’d be much more likely to trust full-genome sequencing rather than SNP sequencing. Plus, you can have a lot of fun with bioinformatics if you get full genome sequences from your family members.
I haven't considered that would be an issue. Great point! I plan to eventually build a parser for Ancestry.com, which lacks an API but has a similar raw format to 23andMe. When that gets done I'll lump them together.
23andme and ancestry.com use a process which needs more genetic material than is available from hair or toothbrushes. You have to get a fair amount of spit in a tube.
One of the more interesting parts of 23andme, at least for me, was finding second and third cousins (likely) that I didn't know. Most of the actual medical tests are fairly non-predictive (1.5x increase in one study for something which is already rare?), but the ancestry part is something where having a lot of participants in a selectively-open database can be interesting.
I do really hope Halcyon (or another company) gets full sequencing costs down as low as they say they can. Then, sequencing becomes just a routine checkbox on blood tests.
Sounds like a good idea for a startup. Really, what they're talking about doing with that data is essentially running a diff on people's genome's, right? Sounds simple enough. ;)
Didn't get mine done, but both of my parents had theirs done. My dad's was pretty much as expected, as far as ancestry (my grandmother is an avid genealogist). On my mom's side there is a lost of uncertainty about our ancestry. Of course, because you only see the mitochondrial DNA result for a female, its not as informative for someone who is probably a mix (like my mom). I think an admixture test will be the one that's really useful.
My dad downloaded his raw data and is enlisting me to use some of the 3rd party tools out there to do some other comparisons, but I haven't really dug into it yet. Home bioinformatics...
Here are the specifics on uploading DNA from third-parties for two of the mentioned DNA geneology sites:
MyHeritage.com[1]:
> "The MyHeritage DNA test enables you to get unique matches to users who have only tested with MyHeritage, as well as matches with users who uploaded their results to MyHeritage from other providers. Thanks to MyHeritage’s wide international reach and availability in more than 40 languages, you will have a greater chance of being matched with relatives who live in other countries. You will also receive a comprehensive ethnicity analysis on MyHeritage, drawing from the largest pool of possible ethnicities in the industry."
"When you transfer, for free, you will receive a list of your autosomal matches from our database and have access to our Family Finder – Matrix. The Matrix feature allows you to select and compare the autosomal DNA relationship between up to ten of your matches at one time."
Please note that you can only transfer the following file versions:
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