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Comment by zackattack | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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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