Reading Your Dna With a Genotyping Chip
Left: Courtesy Sandra Burkett, National Cancer Found, CCR; Right: Frank Schwere At the age of 65, my grandad the managing director of a leather tannery in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, suffered a severe heart assail. He had chest pains and was rushed to the hospital. But that was in 1945, before open heart surgery, and he died a few hours afterwards. By the fourth dimension my father reached 65, he was watching his nutrition and exercising regularly. That regimen seemed fine until a couple of years later, when he developed chest pains during practice, a symptom of severe arteriolosclerosis. A checkup revealed that his claret vessels were chock-full with arterial plaque. Inside ii days he had a triple bypass. 15 years later (15 years that he considers a gift), he'due south had no heart trouble to speak of.
I won't attain 65 till 2033, but I have long causeless that, as regards heart disease, my fourth dimension will come. My genes take predetermined it. To avoid my father's surgery, or my grandfather's fate, I endeavor to eat healthier than most, exercise more most, and never even consider smoking. This, I effigy, is what it will take for me to live past 65.
Turns out that my odds are meliorate than I thought. My DNA isn't pushing me toward eye affliction — it's pulling me away. There are established genetic variations that researchers associate with a higher run a risk for a heart attack, and my genome doesn't have any of those negative mutations; it has positive mutations that really reduce my take a chance. Similar whatever American, I nevertheless have a good chance of eventually developing eye disease. But when information technology comes to an inherited take chances, I have after my female parent, not my begetter.
Chat: Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki
23andMe co-founders Linda Avey (left) and Anne Wojcicki sit downwardly with Wired Scientific discipline special correspondent Adam Rogers to explain how they're helping people make sense of their genetic information.Reading your genomic profile — learning your predispositions for diverse diseases, odd traits, and a talent or two — is something like going to a phantasmagorical family reunion. First yous're introduced to the grandpa who died 23 years before you were born, then you motion forth for a chat with your parents, who are uncharacteristically willing to talk about their health — Dad's prostate, Mom's digestive tract. Adjacent, you have the odd experience of getting acquainted with future versions of yourself, 10, xx, and xxx years downward the route. Finally, you lot confront the prospect of telling your children — in my case, my 8-month-former son — that he, similar me, may face an increased genetic risk for glaucoma.
The experience is simultaneously unsettling, illuminating, and empowering. And now information technology'southward something anyone can accept for about $1,000. This wintertime marks the nativity of a new industry: Companies will take a sample of your DNA, scan information technology, and tell you about your genetic time to come, as well as your ancestral past. A much-anticipated Silicon Valley startup called 23andMe offers a thorough tour of your genealogy, tracing your DNA back through the eons. Sign up members of your family and you tin rails generations of inheritance for traits like able-bodied endurance or bitter-gustation blindness. The company will likewise tell you which diseases and conditions are associated with your genes — from colorectal cancer to lactose intolerance — giving you the ability to accept preventive action. A 2nd company, called Navigenics, focuses on matching your genes to current medical research, calculating your genetic take a chance for a range of diseases.
The advent of retail genomics will make a once-rare experience commonplace. Simply by spitting into a vial, customers of these companies will become early adopters of personalized medicine. We will not live according to what has happened to us (that genu injury from high school or that xx pounds nosotros've gained since higher) nor according to what happens to most Americans (the one-in-three run a risk men have of getting cancer, or women have of dying from heart affliction, or anyone has for obesity). We will live co-ordinate to what our own specific genetic risks predispose us toward.
At Illumina, a San Diego biotech firm, chips are prepared for genotyping in the "decoding bay." one 1 1
Photograph: Brent HumphreysThis new industry draws on science that is just start to sally. Genomics is in its earliest days: The Human Genome Project, the landmark endeavor to sequence the Dna of our species, was completed in 2003, and the research built on that milestone is only now being published. The fact that any consumer with $ane,000 can at present capitalize on this project is a rare case of groundbreaking science overlapping with an eager marketplace. For the moment, 23andMe and Navigenics offering genotyping: the strategic scanning of your Deoxyribonucleic acid for several hundred thousand of the telltale variations that make ane human different from the adjacent. Simply in a few years, every bit the price of sequencing the unabridged genome drops below $ane,000, all 6billion points of your genetic code will be opened to scrutiny.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-genomics/
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