On April 25th, 57 years ago, Watson and Crick published their article in Nature magazine about the structure of DNA.  To celebrate the 50th anniversary (7 years ago), the US Congress established April 25th as "DNA Day".

Since my last gattaca post, the company that did my own dna testing has further specified my maternal haplogroup.  I am now ( Read more... )

I've mentioned epigenetics before. Our genes contain information about everything that our cells CAN build. Wrapped around dna, however, are other chemicals that determine which of those things ARE built.  This extra signaling is inherited from our parents, and it also changes within our lifetimes in response to our environment.

Today, I see the ( Read more... )

Testing such as I had done at 23andme.com is not quite as useful as researchers (and afficionados like me) had once hoped.  They're finding that creatures are much more complex than just the programming in their dna.  Part of the problem is that genetics includes lots and lots of evolutionary baggage.  Study of the machinery that decides which ( Read more... )

First draft, but I just want to get something "finished" enough to post, because I have other tasks to work on this week and need to try getting this one out of my head for a short while.  Summary:  I have 4 autism markers, 2 uncertain, several normal markers, and many that remain untested or unexplained.

geneaddressnormalautism riskmereferenceMET ( Read more... )

I know nothing about my family heritage other than "Irish".  Someone once mentioned: Tennessee, 1800s, Irish.  Someone else would mention Irish marrying other Irish, and later more Irish marrying into the family, and later some more Irish.  Mind you, I never once heard a name associated with any of these cases.  There was only the word Irish.  That ( Read more... )

The email arrived at 11:07pm.  My genetic results are in.

Slight detour first, there was news yesterday about a new technology that may make sequencing much faster in the future.
http://www.physorg.com/news156953933.html

First glance at my "generic" results for specific conditions that they evaluate for people:

Research confidence:Condition:Their take: ( Read more... )

The group called "Autism Speaks" has a really bad reputation amongst the autistic rabble rousers (otherwise known as self-advocates), about the same reputation as "Cure Autism Now" does.  The usual complaint is that they want to eliminate autism, and they have no autistic people on their board or in their programs.  The rallying cry is, "Autism ( Read more... )

I (mistakenly) thought that 23andme was sequencing my dna and sending me the "deltas", all the places in my dna that differed from the reference template.  I was wrong.

Instead, they are genotyping me, meaning that they are testing only specific locations of their choosing.  Granted, they are testing over half a million of these locations, but I'll ( Read more... )

Saturday morning, I mailed off a tube of my spit.  It will take about 8 weeks to get back my results.  When the results are posted online, I will be able to view a vast number of specific points of my DNA to see how they compare against known differences in the human genome.  I'll be using the tag " gattaca" here on LiveJournal to follow my results ( Read more... )

While I do believe that autism represents a different kind of human rather than just an inferior human, I make no attempt to hide the fact that evolution is messy business. Change requires experimentation, and experimentation in this context means that there will be casualties. For every creature in history that benefited from sprouting effective ( Read more... )