February 4, 2013
A study published recently in Science by Susanne Horn and colleagues is a noteworthy example of hypothesis-driven science done right. It exemplifies how seemingly obscure findings can lead to new hypotheses and provide insight into human health and disease. Horn and her colleagues studied a family prone to [...]
January 9, 2013
Thank you, Virginia. In a recent article in Slate, Virginia Hughes, who also blogs for National Geographic, nails it, hammering home the point that people are much smarter and tougher than they’re depicted in many news articles about genetic testing. We’ve written before about what feels like fear [...]
November 5, 2012
(Editor's note: Here is a link to Cory's poster presented at ASHG.) Parkinson’s disease (PD) research has long been a priority at 23andMe. Our Parkinson’s research community is one of the largest in the world with over 9,300 patients. Our research on the disease has been published in peer-reviewed [...]
November 2, 2012
(Editor's note: Here is a link to Eoghan's poster presented at ASHG.) People often use the terms “genotyping” and “sequencing” interchangeably, but they are quite different ways of approaching genetic data. One large difference is the amount of data generated. Genotyping, what 23andMe does, [...]
March 31, 2012
Six months ago, we announced our Exome 80X pilot project. At 23andMe, we’ve carefully followed every advance in sequencing technologies and read every paper comparing them, waiting for the opportunity to offer a meaningful and affordable option to the consumer market. While other (expensive) offerings have [...]
October 31, 2011
Congratulations to Diana Cousminer, the winner of our Exome Giveaway!* Hailing from Finland, Diana is extremely excited to be one of the first people to have her exome sequenced. "I felt like a huge geek because no one at home understood what I had won or why I was so fired up until I explained what an [...]
April 21, 2011
Kathleen Gallagher and Mark Johnson are good reporters but it didn’t take a lot to figure out that the tip they got was big news. Doctors, Gallagher heard, had used genetic sequencing to crack the mystery behind an illness slowly robbing a young boy of his life. “The tip that she had was that they [...]
April 28, 2010
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system, causing unpredictable and varying symptoms that differ from person to person. About 1 in 700 people in the United States is affected by the disease. Because MS often runs in families, it's thought that there is a [...]
March 24, 2010
Denisova cave from the outside. / Bence Viola. DNA isolated from a tiny bone fragment from the finger of a being that walked the earth between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago has possibly added a new branch to the human family tree. The piece of bone was found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains, [...]
June 18, 2009
It's no secret that obesity rates are rising -- quickly. Between 2000 and 2005 the prevalence of obesity rose by 24%. Extreme obesity increased by more than 50%. If current trends continue, more than half of all Americans will be clinically obese by the year 2030. Rapid changes in the prevalence of a [...]
