Whole Genome Sequencing for personal use

Question

[Tamer]

Dear all,

I am interested in doing whole genome sequencing for my personal use. I am planning of looking for disease risk, ancestry, nutrigenomics and other things which may be deemed useful in the future.

I am looking at this as a life-time investment and to understand my body and hence, myself better.

My Bachelor degree was in Bioinformatics. However now I do Neuroscience. And my degree was focused on protein structure so I do not know where I'd start with my analysis if I had my WGS data under my hand.

Can someone please help me and guide me regarding the points I will list below?

1) What is the best and cost-effective WGS solution for my case? I am open to recommendations for companies. 2) For my use case, is WGS better? I know some companies out there do microarray and look for specific markers/SNPs on genes. I think this is limited, as I would like to have my whole genome so that it can be useful to me in the future as science progresses. 3) How easy would it be for me to analyze this data? Are there any free programs out there which can check a list of genes in the genome or perhaps check the genome itself and generate a list of genes and their variants which would allow me to cross check the literature to see what significance those variants have? 4) Overall, is this process worth the effort and money? Would it be better for me to work with a company and use their auto-generated reports on my genome, or shall I analyze my genome completely on my own?

I have come across two companies, one of them is Dante Labs: https://dantelabs.com/products/whole-genome-sequencing

And the other is 24genetics: https://24genetics.com/all-in-one/

Dante Labs is good, as it also generates reports and provides full data. 24genetics as far as I gather only does microarray, so specific genes will be checked. I feel like their reports would be not of much use. They are very superficial and I'm guessing if I had my full genome, I can easily use their reports as a scaffold and check my genome data on my own to see what variants I have.

Thanks for reading. I am waiting for your valuable input.

Answer 1

[Kevin Blighe]

Just use any company that gives you the raw FASTQ files so that you can do your own analysis. Don't trust the reports that they send back. Why? - because, despite >20 years of research [since the release of the first draft of the human genome], we are still clueless as to the true effects on phenotype(s) of >99.999% of genetic variants. We have failed miserably.