How to think about 23andme?
Hong ChangBum
Tuesday, 18 November 2008 10:06 UTC
Hi all,
How to think about 23andme(http://www.23andme.com) service?
awesome! or trash! any comments : )
Thank you,
ChangBum
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Replies
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In a business perspective, they are awesome!. The service is good taking into account the amount of information available about SNPs till date. But their consent form says it all: “The genetic information provided by 23andMe about potential health conditions should not be used to estimate your overall risk of future disease”. Then what’s the point of saying they are a “personalized genomics” company and Sergey saying how it helped him find out that his mutation puts him at a high risk of suffering from Parkinson’s. Quite contradictory ;) . The genealogy service is excellent though.
I should say they are doing good with the genotyping except for the fact they don’t want the customers to believe the results but want them to have their genotypes done through their service. I wonder when will a company say “hey we will give you risk predictions and you can trust the numbers”.
End of the day, having a file full of A, T, G and C doesn’t make sense. Only the interpretation about the predisposition to health conditions or any phenotypic changes and a deterministic result makes sense.
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One’s attitude to this “service” – which you could have helped people by describing – is a social, moral or philosophical one rather than havign anything to do with bioinformatics, given that we are not in a position to judge the scientific accuracy of the service. Any discussion should be in measured English and avoid using words like “awesome” and “rubbish” which convey little more than emotion.
Personally I shudder when I see the word “me” in anything. Me, me, me, me. Sounds like a child of three. Commerce is clearly trying to exploit the introvert Me-generation. Perhaps they deserve it.
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Its a good service but not one for the mass market, not many people would invest the time or be willing to give up such personal privacy.
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I’ve not had direct experience with the services provided, but have taken the time to look through their website and attend a presentation by one of their representatives. It seemed to me that they were not doing a very good job in attempting to convey the nuances and complexities of the genetic information being provided to their clients. That seems deceptive, though in principal I support one’s right to this information.
More intriguing, from a bioinformatics perspective, is their intent to not only provide genetic data, but to collect it, so that it can be mined. This of course raises many issues, but I am interested in how one might be able to use a crowd-sourcing strategy to cope with the vast amounts of existing and yet-to-be harvested biological data.
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I’m currently in the process of getting my SNPs analyzed by 23andMe (I should have it by January). As probably already alluded to, there are essentially two services being provided:
1. They provide you with about 600,000 of your SNPs covering your whole genome.
2. They interpret a number of these SNPs to let you know about various haplotype groups (which will help trace your geographic origin), as well as a number of disease associated SNPs.Analysis is particularly interesting when families do it together as children can see what genes specifically were inherited from which parents, grandparents, etc.
While the second service is great, it is the first service that holds the most value. New genome-wide association studies are being published almost weekly, and the amount of data that is coming in is really huge. By having your personal SNPs, you can, given the proper tools, take the analysis of your genome to an even higher level. I intend on walking through my own 23andMe experience on my blog over the next few weeks.
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What do you think about 2 23andme competitors – Pathway and Trugenetics ?
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