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How To Check Yourself For Abnormal Genes
AnneWoahHickey writes "While the State of California was harassing personalized genomics companies, and hindering the development of personalized medicine, Wired was preparing a guide to genetic testing. It explains how to make sense of the massive sets of raw data offered by 23andMe or deCODEme, and a way to check yourself for genetic abnormalities that are not covered by microarray tests. Facing a medical community that is fiercely resistant to change, the fate of personalized medicine is truly in the hands of consumers."
if you're reading this, you're unlikely to have offspring.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
OK - so first of all 23andme et al do not search for "abnormal genes" - they look for common polymorphisms present in human DNA sequences. These are not abnormal, simply different. Secondly, rs numbers found in association with disease are practically valueless without the underlying functional data, plus replication of the association in different populations. For Zeus' sake, bear this in mind if you ever get one of these tests!
No way in hell anyone who hasn't had massive experience with PCR is going to get results from a DIY PCR. Extracting DNA from a sample is dead easy with the latest generation of kits, and DNA Is fairly stable stuff, but PCR protocols, although simple, are incredibly touchy and take a lot of time to get consistent results from.
The rough equivalent of having a page that says to Joe Public that he can either pay some professional to build a custom database for his companies needs, or he can download OpenOffice and do it himself. It's only cheaper if you don't put a value on time, quality or results.
Bucket? Stapler?
I think you're talking about the more advanced operation "How to remove your liver and live just long enough to put it in a bucket.
People should start with "Remove your liver" that just requires the knife, and then grow up to more complex things.
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This article was clearly written by someone who has no clues to this kind of work. It covers the basic steps although the draft described would not even work (designing primers just by picking 20 bp sequences without checking if you design them into some repeat, or other non unique sequence, without checking that there is no hairpin formation, no primer dimers etc, also he just says 40 cycles in PCR machine without saying that for each prime pairs you need a specific annealing step and describing what other heating steps are required in the PCR machine). Other thing is that he forgot to mention costs and time to do this. Lets say a primer pair is just $1 (it is more even if you order the smallest amount) and one PCR run is roughly 2 hours (with 40 samples) also preparing 40 different samples takes like at least 1 hour of work. Plus you need the materials for PCR (PCR grade water, MgCl2, buffer, the polymerase ensyme, for like 100 reactions at cheapest you can buy them for like $50-100). The PCR machine cost will be almost negligible with its $1000. Now calculate the costs and time needed for like 1 million SNPS. And you realize that home made traditional PCR techniques won't work. Lastly what if you find some SNPs different than others. You need to know the different databases, you need to be able to filter the 99% junk from somethign valid since most of the SNPs are just variations without any change of the functionality. At best they are linked to some disease at a given population and could have no meaning at an other population.