The Idea of the Month Award should certainly be given to Andrew Scheidecker who created a personal genome explorer tool in order to analyze his own data from 23andMe. But let’s read his explanation:

At the time, 23andme’s website didn’t allow you to download the data they gathered from your DNA; my first goal was to write a tool that would allow you to do that. The tool connects to their website via HTTP and parses the raw data from the HTML pages. This doesn’t violate their terms of service and shouldn’t overload their servers; a maximum of 2 simultaneous connections is used by the tool.

The raw data it reads is in the form of a mapping from Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms that 23andme tests (around 600,000 SNPs) to the genotype of that SNP that you matched. It will take a few hours for it to download your data; it’s spread out over thousands of HTML pages.

The traits analyzed are taken from SNPedia; if you see any errors, please update the relevant page on SNPedia.

If we talk about 23andMe, here are the latest updates from Blaine Bettinger, the genetic genealogist.

And you really should take a look at this story written by a new 23andMe customer. I just loved this part:

So how does it feel? It feels a bit scary, actually. I wasn’t expecting the degree of approach-avoidance that I felt, looking at that little plastic tube … and then looking at the fedex envelope to ship it off. I know better than most people that “genetics is not destiny,” … and I’ve been saying for a long time that more accurate information *always* leads to superior decision making. Still … do I really want to know about Hodgkin’s?

Yes. Yes I do.

Anyway, the 23andMe company will hold a press meeting at World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, January 23rd.

This is the future? (Image Credit: cdwan.org)

Further reading:

• Navigenics, 23andMe and Helix Health: The Review
• 23andMe: The Re-Review
• 23andMe’s animated guides to genetics
• Collection of Personalized Genetics-related articles