Aggregated News
I signed up for 23andme in November 2010. I sent them my saliva and received a web login to my genome in return. Or at least that's what I thought back then. Today I'm a bit more informed and know that what 23andme really does is this: they extract some sort of gene soup from my saliva and pour it on a so called DNA microarray chip made by a company called Illumina. These chips are covered with thousands of little testing probes. A probe is made up of a lump of molecules to which the matching pieces of my DNA naturally attach. These molecules are designed in a clever way, so that they light up when a match occurs. Hundreds of thousands of chemical tests run in parallel on the chip. The result is an image that is scanned by a computer and compared to a database of so called SNPs: “snips”. According to Wikipedia, these “single nucleotide polymorphisms” make up about 90 percent of all genetic variation in the human genome.
So when 23andme detects a SNP variation...
So when 23andme detects a SNP variation...