I was chatting with a colleague at work who’d asked me if I know anywhere they could get their genome or exome sequenced. My genome has been sat in the freezer for over five years wanting to go onto a flow cell, but I’ve never been comfortable putting it on our own machines. I did get 23andMe’d a few years ago but they’ve closed the exome for now.
Today there are many sequencing service providers across the world. Would any of them be open to a consumer led project? How many genomes/exomes would we need to sequence to get a price consumers were willing to pay? To test the market we’ve used AllSeq: “the global sequencing marketplace”, and a couple of replies have now come in!
So far only two providers have responded, one saying they don’t do consumer genomics, the other offering genomes at $1799 (we’re still waiting to hear about exome costs). We’ll wait a bit longer to see what other replies come in but it certainly seems to me that the era of consumer personalised genomics is here, and that this is only likely to grow in the next few years. The other person I’m doing this with is a bioinformatician so is happy with the raw data; I’ll be aiming to run some of Illumina’s tools on BaseSpace for genomes and exomes.
If there are other people with similar experiences please get in touch with your stories.
If you are a service provider and you’d like to discuss pricing please get in touch. We’d be very happy to write up a piece for CoreGenomics on the experience (for a discount obviously).
I'm in if you get a sensible price 🙂
BGI are clearly game, as they did it for Manuel Corpas:
http://manuelcorpas.com/tag/exome/
How about the Illumina Understand Your Genome program.
For example
http://blog.mlin.net/
The Corpas genomes and the UYG both cost around $5000 each. We did not think that is a price most consumers would be willing to pay, and as such we've asked for prices of both exomes and genomes. I'd tried to get a KickStarter project going myself and they did not think it was a suitable project to approve. Both the Corpasome and the UYG's that have been discussed are the pioneers of what I hope will be a flood of personal genome data.
James, you aren't the first to come to AllSeq looking for 'personal genomes'. The providers are still a bit reluctant (as you've found out), but I think they'll start addressing this need as the market grows. (And if there are any providers out there willing to offer this service, we'd love to have you on the Sequencing Marketplace!)
Evan harder than sequencing is to analyze it, because human genome is extremely compressed