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Indeed, did you receive as Christmas present the kit for sequencing your genome? May be not, but many thousands of people did. And this is amazing!
There are several companies that are offering private people the possibility of sequencing their genome (23andMe, Omegabioservice, Illumina, Cegat, OriGene, Eurofins Genomics, AncestryDNA, …) with prices varying from 59$ (AncestryDNA) up to 999€ (Cegat) and much more (Illumina).
The price variation is related to the amount of the genome that is actually sequenced. As an example, AncestryDNA has the goal of finding out your origin, where your ancestors came from and to that effect only few parts of the genome are relevant, hence the low 79$ price. At the other end Illumina can provide you with a complete sequencing and the price goes up over 1,000$.
Anyhow, what I think is amazing is the drop in price. Less than 20 years ago the sequencing of the first genome took 7 years and required several billion $. Today you can get a genome sequenced in days (with part of that time used for sending the specimen and receiving the result..) at a cost that is less than one millionth of that.
The kit shown in the figure is from 23andMe, it is available in the US and a few European Countries. In other Countries you can get similar service from different companies. The process is quite easy. You have to part from a few of your hair and send them to the company for DNA extraction and sequencing (in some cases they ask for your spit). In a few weeks (most of the time within two weeks) you get the result in form of a map showing your ancestry origin plus other information.
The sequencing provided by most of these companies is mostly for fun (and it is fun to look back into your past, isn’t it?). More expensive, and complete, sequencing like the one provided by Illumina can be used for medical investigation. However, as Time as pointed out in an article just before Christmas do not expect your genome sequencing to tell you how long is your life expectation, whether you are likely to get cancer and so on. So far our knowledge on the “implication” of the genome are quite limited. What we can already do in health care is to look at the genome once you have been diagnosed a specific ailment and look for specific genes that would make one cure more effective than another (this has become normal practice in some form of cancer cure).
