It’s my birthday in a few weeks and I thought I’d get myself genotyped by 23andMe as a birthday present to myself.

The lab I run offers genotyping and whole genome sequencing so it feels a bit crazy to be sending this out to a company when I could run the chips myself. I also thought I could do some of the analysis using some of the web based tools and Galaxy. I also saw Dan MacArthurs blog about a FireFox plugin, this should throw up some interesting tidbits next time I am browsing through UCSC or the literature. There are probably some legal and ethical issues about performing my own genome analysis but perhaps once I get the results I’ll ask my boss if I can start using my genome library as the control on our flowcells.

The order has been placed and I now have an account on the 23andMe website.It will soon be time to start spitting and then waiting for results. I don’t know if 23andMe use the Illumina multi-sample kit, but if they do hopefully in another year or so 2-5M snps will be the order of the day. The current 23andMe v3 chip is one of Illuminas HumanOmniExpress arrays, genotyping 730,000 SNPs plus 200,000 custom SNPs selected by 23andMe.

I will keep posting about this genome adventure as I get my results and start to look at them. There are some other great sites already bringing these technologies into the public domain. My favourite is Genomes Unzipped, do take a look if your not already aware of what that team is doing. I have also signed up to the personal genome project, but as a non-US citizen can’t actually join yet.

PS: Sorry Dan but I am adding one more white european ancestry sample to the 23andMe database.

PPS: If you do want to know I’m after international copies of The Hobbit, which I collect, as my other pressies. If you have an old copy lying around feel free to send it and I’ll make a donation to charity for each copy I receive. The older the better but do check yours is not worth a fortune before sending it!!! I am particularly looking for a Spanish copy.