Jan 24, 2008

Another Player Joined the Personal Genomics Craze

Announced January 24, 2008, SeqWright, a Houston, TX company, joined the recent craze of personal genomics by offering a DNA test to consumers at $998.

Another player joins the "23etAl" craze!

My friend at BioTeam -- Michael Cariaso, who is also the author of the well known SNPedia, coined a word "23atAl". I like Michael's creation!

"23atAl" describes the companies of 23andme, Navigenics, deCODEme, Knome and alike, who are trying to provide consumers with genotying service.
Link
The information provided by SeqWright is cursory. My instinct tells me that they are using Affymetrix SNP arrays. If so, it will be a direct competitor to Navigenics.

A distinctive feature of the SeqWright offering is the copy number variation analysis. So far as I know, it is the first one providing this information to consumers, although we use it regularly in research as a by-product of running SNP arrays.

A quick update: Blogger Daniel MacArthur (his Genetic Future blog here) also created an interesting word play, "me two": 23andMe and deCODEme.

1 comment:

cariaso said...

SeqWrite will be using the Affy genomewide 6, which is affy's largest human chip.

I don't know for certain if this is the same chip as Navigenics, since Navigenics just don't really exist yet. At this rate I'm not sure they ever will.

Regardless, deCODEme's 1M chip, has 2x the number of SNPedia annotated snps. The affy chip hold some promise for CNV work, but by the time that is useful to consumers we will be running a next generation of chips.

When where there actually be 23 members of 23etAl?