Jul 04 2008
The question: What does DNA look like?
While many of the 23andMe scientists have purified DNA more times than we’d like to remember, there are a fair number of people here (on the science team and on the engineering and business teams) who’ve never spent any time at the lab bench. We love all things DNA [...]
Jun 24 2008
This morning 23andMe bravely went were no other personal genome service has gone before – Second Life!
Bertalan Mesko of scienceroll.com kindly arranged for us (ErinC and joyce) to give a presentation about our company on Second Nature, an island operated in Second Life by the Nature Publishing Group. We talked about the basics [...]
Jun 20 2008
What can we learn from studying how variations of human genes are spread out around the world?
A lot, said population geneticist and Harvard junior fellow Sohini Ramachandran, who spoke at 23andMe this week.
Ramachandran focused on how genes spread from one continent to another, and how they vary within each region as well.
As an example, she [...]
Jun 16 2008
Jesse James
One of the most engaging features of 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service is a customer’s ability to trace his or her genetic ancestry using the mitochondrial DNA and the Y-chromosome. Once customers learn their own ancestry, the Genome Sharing feature allows them to see how they compare with friends and family.
However, the ancestry section of [...]
Jun 13 2008
Roy King is a clinical psychiatrist at Stanford University. He’s also a scholar who uses genetics and archaeology to figure out how agriculture spread through Anatolia and the Mediterranean region of Europe more than 10,000 years ago.
Now Roy has another genetic puzzle to consider – himself. With the help of 23andMe, he can now see [...]
Jun 11 2008
SNPwatch gives you the latest news about research linking various traits and conditions to individual genetic variations. These studies are exciting because they offer a glimpse into how genetics may affect our bodies and health; but in most cases, more work is needed before this research can provide information of value to individuals. For that [...]
May 16 2008
Last week 23andMe founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki were interviewed at the second annual New Yorker Conference by Michael Specter, a staff writer for the magazine. The theme of the conference was “Stories from the Near Future,” and boy, do we have some of those.
You can watch the video here.
May 14 2008
Could this be Lilly Mendel?
The judges have met and a winner has been chosen.
In the first 23andMe Win Your Genome Contest, the challenge was to describe Lilly Mendel – a real person whose data are presented in the 23andMe demo account – based on her genetic information alone. As we declared in the announcement of [...]
May 03 2008
Sometimes our customers ask us about the accuracy of their 23andMe data. How certain are we that they really do have the genotypes we report?
The answer is, very certain. We typically claim that the genotyping technology we use reports the correct call for more than 99.9 percent of the approximately 580,000 single-letter DNA variations we [...]
Apr 29 2008
This woman shares 99.5% of her DNA with Lilly Mendel.
Team 23andMe likes games – Wii tennis and Segway polo are big here. So are friendly wagers over a new employee’s ACTN3 genotype, or whether a given Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation will converge during our lifetimes.
So in the spirit of friendly competition, we’re starting the [...]
