Craig Venter and colleagues compare consumer genetic tests and suggest ways to make them more useful.
An interesting study simply comparing the results from two different personal genomics companies. While the sequences sent back were almost perfectly matched, “For the seven diseases analyzed by the researchers, only about half of the risk factors provided by 23andme and Navigenics agreed for the five patients. For instance, for lupus and type 2 diabetes, three of the five subjects received conflicting results.”
The main difficulty with genomics these days isn’t the sequencing technology (although making it cheaper and even more accurate is always good), but in interpreting the data. Large-scale data collection like the Personal Genome Project will certainly help by connecting more and more data about people’s health to people’s sequences, but perhaps associations that are so hard to find may also be hard to generalize to the entire mail-order genomics population.
