Mythbusting Personalized Genomics

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=563

by blasdel • 17 years ago

7 1 17 years ago

leecho0• 17 years ago

Good points. Genetic testing is still at its infancy, so we really don't know that much about the relationship between genetic code and actual diseases. Very expensive large scale testing is needed to improve accuracy, so the best alternative is to tell the user how they came up with the numbers. I think these companies do know that their techniques aren't very useful right now, but they want to get a head start on what will inevitably be a big part of our society.

FTA: it’s that no matter your genetic makeup, most common diseases can be prevented with proper diet and exercise.

Some nit-picking points: "myth1 - having your genome read is like hex-dumping the ROM of your computer" Many many interesting high throughput sequencing methods are coming out, and they would actually give you the full sequence of your genome. However, to follow your analogy of hex-dumping, we don't know the assembly language to decode what the genome does. What these companies do give you, though, are the places in the genome that are related to diseases, which would be enough if we had enough data about the relationship between the disease and the genetic code.

What's more interesting, is reading mRNA with those sequencing or microarray technologies, which tells you what code is currently being run in the cell. That would not only tell you your inherited disposition for disease, but the current status of your health -- strong correlations were found for certain genes and cancer fatality. But of course, it's not available to consumers yet.

"The majority of SNP mutation-based “predictions” are correlative, not causative" You need to do very specific tests to find out causation. Correlation don't mean causation, but they are significantly related, and it makes sense to use it as a predictive tool under certain circumstances.

Mythbusting Personalized Genomics

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