Guy commits his genome to Github, smartass forks and issues a pull request
github.com
github.com
"That ugly nose is your father's"
"Your mother is the one that gave you X disease."
(rhetorical musing question)
And also we'll see more people asking for changes on appearance than health.
"No instructions on how to build"
https://github.com/cariaso/dna
These edits were proposed by Michael Cariaso, whom I met recently. Mike runs a cool site called http://snpedia.com.
SNPedia is like 23andme, except every night SNPedia reads PubMed abstracts to see if it can determine information about more SNPs. So, I believe it now gives information on 10x as many SNPs as 23andme, because it groks a lot more medical research.
SNPedia has a mode where you do not even need to upload your data to them, instead you simply download the program and run it locally. But, regardless, you need to get your DNA, and 23andme is the cheapest option for doing so.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211334
(5 hours ago)
and still this post is the most upvoted
Imagine how much money the people who discovered it would end up making!
And they'd start making it right away ;)
For more information about the raw format used by 23 and Me: http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/23andMe
Also, he explicitly released it under the Creative Commons Public Domain License. Incidentally, I wonder if that has any patent implications? Does having genomes in the public domain prevent pharma companies from patenting their "discoveries"?
msporny created dna and everyone else forked it. This is the family tree.
The cost of sequencing decreases by a factor of 10 (!) a year per base pair. I will wait until it's cheap to sequence my whole genome, before I'll shell out the money.
(Synthesizing also gets cheaper by around the same factor. But it started from a higher level of cost.)
If and when they offer the service for a complete sequence, I'll probably pay the money again, just to have a complete record.
Some highlights:
Both my fiancé and I are carriers for a mild form of Hemochromatosis, so we have a 1/4 chance of having a kid with it.
I am a little bit Asian! That's probably the Jewish ancestry. My fiancé thought he had a black ancestor but it turns out was 100% European. My best friend, whose father had always told her that her grandmother was Native American, found out he was lying to her (which did not surprise but did disappoint her.) Also the heat map of where your mitochondria are from is fun; it confirmed what I knew already but it was still really cool to see that the first migration of my maternal line out of Greece was with my grandmother.
But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Part of what makes 23andme so fun is you get to learn a lot about biology from the framework of your own genes. Each SNP they report on has a bunch of information associated with it. It's only boring if you aren't interested in biology.
The cool thing about 23andme though is that they're always rolling out new stuff. There is a separate, more detailed ancestry break-down in their "labs" (a part of the website for experimental stuff) but it's not very good. Part of the problem is that there isn't enough research pinning down large swaths of the genome to more specific areas. So what 23andme does is use user reported data- which is problematic due to globalization and limited by people's knowledge.
The only other things that are good and can really pin down geography are your mitochondrial DNA, like I mentioned, and the Y chromosome.
For my friends in systems biology it's now almost cheaper to just send their microbes in for sequencing than doing their own gel electrophoresis.
(If you want to read around in Wikipedia, also have a look at Southern blots and Western blots, and DNA microarrays.)
I just thought I'd point out that you're really just getting a 25MB patch to a 3GB file (which is really duplicated to 6GB).
ie: removed increased risk of coronary artery disease at rs1333049
Pretty awesome
http://help.github.com/pull-requests/
makes sense now, pretty funny comment about the nipple.
Given how that works out for the world we live in, there really would be more bugs than anything else....
MAYBE even with bacteria and viruses to predict and then cure diseases before they even present themselves!
I doubt our understanding of genetics/biology is extensive enough for this yet, not to mention the computing power needed, but it seems quite possible.
1) Moore's law holds across worlds. 2) People/beings will, for various reasons (historic, sociological, experimenting, play) want to simulate another world (at a social/molecular/submolecular, etc level). 3) If they simulate one, they'll likely do more. 4) Ergo, there will be more simulated worlds than real ones. 5) Therefore we are more likely to live in a simulated world/universe than in a first order one.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Think about this when you unplug something in the future...
- The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a stage where it can simulate its ancestors.
- Future humanity will have no interest in simulating its ancestors.
- We are almost certainly living in an ancestor simulation now.
In the future, common practice.