so if I'm new to this, how can I use this machine to test out for diseases? That seems like a good first practical use.
1. First find a risk gene of interest. You can find a gene name via flipping through scientific articles about the disease, and then finding the exact sequence of the gene on NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/genome/guide/human/inde...).
2. Design primers that amplify around the region of interest. ($15 maybe tops?)
3. Toss everything into a PCR machine and amplify it up. ($3 or so for per-run reagents?)
4. Take your amplified product and send it off for sequencing (another like $10 or so?). When you get the sequence back, compare your sequence to the published sequence and see how it looks!
There are a few caveats in primer design, and there are some other ways of detecting disease markers, but this is one easy relatively low-cost approach.