Saturday, 14 January 2012

A DNA Sequencer Cheap Enough For (Some) Doctors' Offices

Yes, you bring your doctor a thumb drive with 3 billion base pairs of your genome, coding for 23,000 genes. Do you know what he says?

"What am I supposed to do with that?"

Years ago, people thought that we could find Mendelian genes for all the important things in health and disease. Now it turns out that most of the important things we want to know are controlled by hundreds or thousands of genes, each of which increases the risk by 1%, sometimes less. That's for things like cholesterol, autoimmune diseases, cancer susceptibility, etc.

For the most part, your family history is a better predictor than any genome screening. Gene tests usually aren't useful unless you have a particular gene in your family and you want to find out whether you have it, like the BRCA genes for breast cancer. If your mother died of breast cancer at age 40 because of the BRCA1 gene, and you don't have the BRCA1 gene, you don't have to worry.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/BEdzi8FOdb0/a-dna-sequencer-cheap-enough-for-some-doctors-offices

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