Bid To Have Your Whole Genome Sequenced On Ebay | Hacker News Reader

Bid To Have Your Whole Genome Sequenced On Ebay

singularityhub.com

14 pointskkleiner11 comments

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Wait,

Venter: $10 Million

2007: $1 Million

2008: $350,000

2009: $5,000

2010: $1,000

Um, like, holy fuck.

2015: Your DNA on a t-shirt for $30 at a mall kiosk.

>Um, like, holy fuck.

No doubt. Exponential trends like these are all over the place (life expectancy, CPU performance, etc...)

One of my favorites is life expectancy [1]: 1850: 38 1900: 48 1950: 66 2000: 74 2004: ~76

This kind of trending is one of the foundational aspects of Ray Kurzweil and Co's singularity forecasts.

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

um...that progression of life expectancy isn't exponential.

Perhaps you can fit it to the following form (twiddling with parameters a and b):

life expectancy = (maximum life expectancy) - a * exp(-time*b)

If yes, you could still call it exponential in a certain sense of the word. But I doubt that will be very helpful.

Can someone please explain the difference between having your whole genome sequenced, and the product by 23andme et alia?

Many might mistakenly think that genomes are already being sequenced for $1,000 by companies like 23andme and decodeme, but these companies do not offer full genome sequencing. Instead they only analyze a few hundred thousand hot spots in your dna called SNP’s that can tell you lots of interesting things about your dna, but not the whole story. Fully sequencing every single one of the approximately 3 billion base pairs of your dna is a completely different scenario and the price of doing this is coming down rapidly.

Having your genome sequenced means reading every 'letter' of your DNA. 23andMe, on the other hand, tests your DNA for 'SNPs' which are defined variations in human DNA.

A great explanation of SNPs comes from 23 and me's website: https://www.23andme.com/gen101/snps/

Yes, but they do give you an entire dump of your raw Genome that you can save to your PC... soon enough you'll be able to download a free program to analyze that data :D

No, it's not an entire dump. 23andMe only decode certain bits of your DNA which are known to be interesting - they call this "genotyping" as opposed to "sequencing", which is decoding the entire genome.

Most of your genome is shared by all mammals > all humans > all humans with your common ancestry. So it's not very interesting.

23andme gives you the 650,000 bits of your genome that are most interesting.

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