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Just wait a couple more years, and get a full genome sequence for the same price. We've already got SNPchips that can do almost 2 million genetic tests for about $500. Admittedly, that's for high-volume (96 individuals at least) research-based analysis, but I'm sure it will enter the general public arena in due time.

This is not the same as sequencing their genomes. This will not provide a full sequence of each person's genome. It will look for specific mutations that have already been identified and tell us who has certain point mutations.

Think of it as the difference between having the full text of the file in the case of sequencing and having a count of the number of times the writer wrote "teh" instead of "the"

This is not to say that this study is without merit but it is not gene sequencing or genomic sequencing.

For more information on SNP arrays wikipedia is helpful and if you really want details you can talk to Affymetrix (I bet these are the arrays they will use).

Someone please mod the parent higher. It's good to see someone who seems to know what's going on.

The grandparent message is correct that the $1000 genome will not tell you about BRCA 1/2 or other "patented" genes. In fact, I'd have a hard time believing this tells users much about many diseases. The truth of the matter is that most genetic disease are caused by several mutations which may elevate risk. Mendelian traits -- those caused by a single mutation -- are quite rare and you're likely to know if you have one. Conditions like lupus, diabetes, heart disease, and numerous others are caused by a combination of LOTS of genes and unknown environmental factors. To give you an idea of the relative importance of the two, the identical twin of someone with lupus has something like a 25% risk of developing the disease (don't impale me if I got the number wrong, 25% is in the neighborhood). To confound matters, mutations outside of genes in parts of the genome formerly referred to as junk DNA play an ill-defined, yet important role in many (or perhaps most) complex genetic diseases. Discovering you have a rare mutation in some seemingly random spot isn't all that helpful, even if it's going to cause you to drop dead some day.

Mapping disease risk mutations is a very rich area of research. Here's a taste: some people suspect that mutations operating in pairs or general n-tuples may cause disease in specific combinations. The drag here is that when these mutations are tested individually, they may show little or no statistical association. To test even all pairs is intractable (NP complete for you CS types) and doing so introduces a statistical nightmare with lots of semi-independent tests inflating the false positive rate.

I'd suggest you save your money for a few years unless you just really want to know about ancestry, which is relatively easy to determine from many fewer SNPs than these companies are offering. I don't recall the details, but I suspect something like this plus freely available software should do the trick. You just need to find a lab with a hyb oven and a microarray scanner and a statistician to do the analysis.

The claim that you can't get iPod cost info is crap. Go to iSuppli and you can get a detailed bill-of-materials and materials costs on the latest (or older) iPods. You can argue that "oh iPod is >10%" but that's pathetic argument - once you're that big it there's enough collateral interest that you can easily find the info. If you're not that big, what you company does doesn't really matter. This is pretty basic stuff if you're doing financial analysis for a living unless you're a lazy *ss - like Greenberg apparently is - this is his job - he works for the fricking WSJ already. Boohoo! I can't find everything I need to know about a company in their 10K filing. Pull you head out of your posterior already. If WSJ can't be bothered to make the effort...

Financial statements are necessarily incomplete representations of the company. The truth is usually obscured as much by the "fog of war" and intent. If you want to see a more interesting case of intent, look at the latest 10K and 10Q of Affymetrix. They lead with the balance sheet instead of the usual income statement. That tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Not that I'm surprised it's come to that.

I constantly hear people complaining about how this or that isn't spoon-fed to them. At work I get job applicants and customers who ask why our software isn't like Powerpoint. Hey knob! If it were that trivial no one would need to hire you! Dorks! Neither softare nor interpreting corporate finances are one of those "Go to the freezer and get the box" kind of activities. Never will be. Oh yes, I've ended interviews and torn-up their resumes in their faces on occasion when I've gotten that comment. No morons please!

I am intrigued by who this guy is though. He doesn't really seem to be on the radar - very little info to be got from Google. I think he is not a physics prof.
Some sleuthing turned up the following:
1) He's an MIT graduate.
2) He a (very) few published papers on the idea in his slides.
3) He worked for a company called Affymetrix that makes gene microarrays.
4) One of the physics faculty at Penn State, who works on carbon nanotubes, is called Alexander Mayer, but reading his CV, I think this is not the same person.
5) There's some personal info here from a housing ad he posted on a berkely lab page.

OAKLAND HILLS home, furn bdrm & ba avail for visiting scholar, euro style decor, lge closet, desk/computer workstation, DSL, lge secluded patio on 1/3 acre with stunning view, lge liv room, close to trails & Chabot observatory, 36" telescope for use, secure storage, close to pub trans, exc kitchen, share home w/ single, straight professional male homeowner, age 38 w/ no pets, $1,200/mo incl util on a month-to-month basis, pref pros in astrophysics/physics/math, Alex, amayer@alum.mit.edu

That's about all I can find.

Ok... so the article is not exactly new, nor interesting, so I'm gonna talk about something related :

DNA microarrays from Affymetrix, used to quantify gene expression, are built on a process inspired from CPU design (photolitography - read more about it here). Chips are getting more complex with time, ala Moore Law (shrinking the probe cells to get more density); the most recent human chip harbor 1 300 000 probes representing 39000 transcripts and variants.

So technology developed for CPU is helping to find cures for diseases, increase our knowledge of life... etc. Isn't cool?

Cool...sounds like it might be genechip version 2.0. But it also sounds like (I don't have access to Nature Materials and I'm not gonna pay $15 for the article) they PT Barnumed their article a bit. I don't study pathology, but I don't know how much DNA fragments anthrax will leave around. And sarin? Geeze...yeah you can make it from Castor beans but will your end product definitely won't have DNA remaining. But like the blurp said, it's preliminary.

> Knowing the amino acid sequences is a big key to being able to figure out how things work. Some examples:

Minor nit: the genome is the nucleic acid sequence, not the amino acid sequence. Amino acids are what proteins are made of.

> You want to know what part of the genome makes us uniquely human rather than, say, a mouse. You will soon be able to compare the whole human genome to the whole mouse genome (which will be out in a couple of years) and see where they're similar and where they're different.

Also it should provide new insights into the molecular basis of evolution, if you can compare the sequences of the same gene in different organisms to see which ones are more similar (i.e. more closely related).

Or, in molecular evolution jargon, these important genes are "highly conserved," and don't get changed much by mutations over evolutionary time, or else the organism won't function. This set of genes might be considered the "kernel" or "core OS" of biology. Except in this case, the code actually builds the hardware... ;)

> You find a protein that's implicated in some disease or other. You correlate data generated from the unknown protein with the sequences for all human proteins to identify it. There's an excellent chance that you'll be able to figure out what it does by comparing it to known genes in other organisms.

And with the "gene chip" technology like that produced by companies like Affymetrix, you could presumably determine which genes are expressed differently in different disease states, and then work on medications that return the system to a healthy state.

> You don't know what the protein above does. You can do experiments to see which other proteins it associates with (there are several ways of doing this) and that will often give you excellent information about what it does.

> Coming soon You have identified a protein but can't figure out what it does. Using its sequence, you will soon be able to predict its 3-D structure, which can give you clues about what it does.

These last two points are related and important. Using the protein sequence information which can be derived from the genome, it may make easier the task of those who are trying to solve the computationally difficult problem of predicting protein structure from sequence, the "protein folding" problem. Once that's solved, you would have the ability to design proteins de novo, a potentially powerful technique for implementing molecular nanotechnology.

Now the real weirdness begins...

LaoK

This sounds interesting, but it's got nothing to do with a tricorder. It's talking about a mix of technologies including hybridization arrays like Affymetrix makes, which involve isolating DNA, performing some reactions and then using the chip and a scanner to analyze the results. I saw a demo of Caliper's microfluidics a while ago and was really impressed - basically it's like a CPU with liquid reagents instead of electrons. It uses minuscule volumes, which makes it really quick, precise and efficient. Cool, but not a nonivasive diagnostic tool like a tricorder.

Actually, a tricorder is more similar to CAT/PET/MRI imaging.