How to sequence your own DNA at home

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bbilsbie about 6 hours ago 48 commentsRead Article on bradleywoolf.com

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Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

munib_ca•about 4 hours ago

> This is intended to be read by AI- please just copy and paste the URL of this and have ChatGPT walk you through it. If you have AR glasses, even better, since the AI can walk you through the whole protocol.

What kind of magic is going on here, am I missing something?

shresthjain•4 minutes ago

I feel it's actually kind of smart. Most people won't be reading the blog post themselves, they'd ask GPT to understand the text and fetch the summary or whatever is relevant to them. The author has directly made the resource such that it is optimised for the output after that mostly-everyone-would-do-this step.

alwa•about 2 hours ago

I suspect the intention is to give specific but dense notes with minimal explanation, on the theory that the LLM will fill in the appropriate hand-holding along the way

__MatrixMan__•about 3 hours ago

I've bee thinking about starting a company where I fish roots out of your sewer and identify the plant (by sequence if necessary) that you have to kill so your sewer doesn't collapse as soon as it otherwise would.

$100 to stave off that $10000 sewer replacement for a few years would be worth it to a lot of people

cowthulhu•about 2 hours ago

That’s a really clever idea, I would definitely pay for that in the right circumstances.

Now that I think about it - could you just pour some sort of biodegradable broad-spectrum herbicide down the drain to get the same effect for cheaper?

eks391•about 1 hour ago

This is precisely what I do each year with a product designed for this exact purpose. $8+shipping gets me enough for my annual pipe maintenance. It's even the special kind because I have clay pipes.

I don't wasn't to kill parents idea. It's neat, and Im sure there's use cases that my solution doesn't meet

__MatrixMan__•about 1 hour ago

I hope yours keeps working for you. I flushed a lot of blue crystals, but the plant was not deterred.

hahahaa•about 2 hours ago

Hard to get a plumber to knock on my door for under $100. Maybe you mean $500? Or is it $100 for the lab bit only?

__MatrixMan__•about 2 hours ago

Well if you have this problem, then having the plumber over is a sunk cost. You're paying them regularly to clear the sewer, and their snake will come back with root matter in the bit. Put that sample in a zip-lock bag and call me. I'll come over, take the sample, and identify the plants near your sewer line. If I get a match, I'll sell that info to you for $100.

Once I figure out how to make it work at all, I'll build a network of plant nerds and teach them to do the same in their cities, and pivot to providing lab services and training for them. Much of the time no sequencing will be required, just a microscope and knowledge of what's growing nearby. But if they have more than one plant of the same species, sequencing will be necessary.

Fingers crossed they're not clones, though I suppose I could do lab testing for that as well, and then I maybe you'd have to kill multiple just to be sure you got the one. In that case, hopefully I'd have at least narrowed it down for you. Probably would just deny the job if the odd of being helpful are low, like if you have 50 clones of the same tree all growing along your sewer line, then I can't help you, it's time to start saving for a liner or a replacement.

It's like uber, but for shit-covered roots.

fragmede•about 3 hours ago

Do it!

Aurornis•about 6 hours ago

I wish this had some discussion of the results. The earlier reports about this sensor and process were very mixed. It’s a cool process either way, but I’d like to know how usable the real world output can be.

KashifNY•about 1 hour ago

Bringing everything to your doorstep and everything at your feet and everything near your fingertips is just what all industries are trying to accomplice. The cartoon Animation Wall-E has scenes in it where they show obese humans doing everything through a screen though notice their legs and feet and it's as if they've mutated to a point where they aren't able to walk anymore and all their transport is through a hovering chair cum bed.

mirmor23•12 minutes ago

I watched wall-e in theater, and when that scene came on, i remember muttering 'what bs'; since then, i recall that scene every time i see a situation of 'convenience at all costs'; metaphorically they were pretty accurate even after discounting ozempic influence;

mephux•about 5 hours ago

https://www.the-odin.com/whole-genome-sequencing-30x/

If you want it quick and cheap(er) - 599.00

drdaeman•about 5 hours ago

If it's an US-based lab, aren't they subject to CLIA with all its retention requirements?

For $7.5k+ you get a guaranteed privacy (as other comments suggest, other properties may vary, but at least the data never leaves your home).

vibrio•about 5 hours ago

I suspect there is a deep sequencing service that is non CLIA and cheap. True. they may not be trustworthy with the data. That said, there are steps here where the data is put into Claude. Do we trust that ?

drdaeman•22 minutes ago

That's another vector, and everyone considers separately. But at least here one can - hypothetically - have a BAA and zero-retention agreement with Anthropic. Which means they have moderately strong incentives to wipe your data after a fairly short while. CLIA, if I don't misremember, mandates a few years at minimum.

tzumby•about 4 hours ago

I would never trust that. Instead I would use Claude to teach me genomics and build the tools to process and interpret data locally

j45•about 3 hours ago

A service is not the same as the equipment

dwa3592•about 5 hours ago

This is so cool. Thanks for doing this. The fact that we have this in a palm sized object is just crazy. Also, if/when we have a similar sized device for doing CRISPR .... umm i should stop here - it's becoming the plot of Gattaca

purpleidea•about 2 hours ago

I like the privacy conscious aspects. Apart from the obvious issue of "run it through Claude" how many of those referenced analysis tools are entirely open source or at least run locally? Would have liked to see that in the article.

ggirelli•30 minutes ago

At a quick glance, they all seem to have published their source code and they do run locally.

armanj•about 3 hours ago

one main marketing leverage of 23andMe, AncestryDNA, etc are fulfilling the curiosity of people who want to know which part of the world their genes are from. I guess that dataset should be preparatory.

sergey-a•about 1 hour ago

Problem with those providers - they only check 700K positions out of 3 billion and there is no mapping quality or allelic depth data in those dataset and this is critical for assessing whether the detected variant is a false positive or real.

It's not suitable for health investigations since most of DNA is not sequenced and genotyping technology is known to produce high rate of false positive for rare mutations.

(I'm the solo-founder of Gene Inspector Pro, mentioned in the blog post). AMA. :)

whatever1•about 6 hours ago

What is the accuracy in this ? Aka if I run the experiment 10 times how many differences will i get? I don’t have a physical sense on what would be a good number.

myhf•about 5 hours ago

You would get a lot of differences, but the errors would cancel each other out with enough depth of coverage.

This technology's baseline accuracy is around 95% per base, so 10x reads of every segment in the sample would give >99% accuracy for each base after aligning the reads with each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverage_(genetics)

Jules-Bertholet•about 5 hours ago

> so 10x reads of every segment in the sample would give >99% accuracy for each base after aligning the reads with each other

This assumes random errors, which IIRC isn't the case for Oxford Nanopore.

Jules-Bertholet•about 5 hours ago

Oxford Nanopore unfortunately has a high error rate (3-5%) compared to other sequencing technologies. And the errors are non-random

TurdF3rguson•about 3 hours ago

I'm too afraid I would learn something awful about myself.

peyton•about 1 hour ago

Unfortunately you’d have no power to correct it. Even if such a thing were possible. I hope that changes.

TurdF3rguson•34 minutes ago

Are you talking about time travel? I don't think that would help.

ggirelli•29 minutes ago

More like genome editing.

SilentM68•about 2 hours ago

Reminds me of the Gloing Plant Project. I never got my glowing flower but would have settled for the instruction manual, also never created :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glowing_Plant_project

By the by, can't seen to bring up the actual site linked on this post.

shellfishgene•29 minutes ago

You can get one here, you'll have to wait until next year though: https://light.bio/

metalman•about 5 hours ago

I am very impressed with the, why wait? just do it now approach to the future. which while not here, IS there.

dekhn•about 5 hours ago

Nothing about this is the future. Sequencing at home will not solve any major problems. It's mainly a fun exercise to demonstrate that sequencing has been commodified.

ngsevers•about 2 hours ago

I disagree, I sequenced with nebula genomics years ago.. you can understand risk factors for various problems so that you can start interventions that make sense way in advance.

ElenaDaibunny•about 3 hours ago

just a hobby project for now,pretty wild that this can be done at home.

fragmede•about 2 hours ago

Knowing exactly why I have high LDL because of a specific mutation on my DNA is very much the future, imo.

bleepblap•about 5 hours ago

> This is intended to be read by AI

Fuck this

tclancy•about 4 hours ago

Man, doctors thought they had it bad before. For just a six yards I can play Peter Thiel at home! $6k invested so I can set an AI in YOLO mode to tell me I have some hyper-specific version of kennel cough?

“But that occurs in dogs?”

“You’re right. Let me look into actual gene sequencing instead of just guessing. I think the N is the load bearing letter.”

fennec-posix•about 2 hours ago

Funniest thing I read today, thank you!

hahahaa•about 2 hours ago

As long as the AI doesn't brush its teeth all good.

asveikau•about 5 hours ago

Yeah that's weird. The instructions are not even hard to read. I don't understand what an LLM would add to this.

SuperSixFour•about 5 hours ago

Literally left the article to come here and say this.

joel_liu•about 3 hours ago

The "non-random errors" point buried a few replies down deserves to be the headline, not a footnote. With Illumina, 10x coverage genuinely washes out errors because they're closer to independent per-read noise. With Nanopore, errors cluster at specific motifs (homopolymers, certain k-mers) due to how the pore physically reads the strand — so the same systematic mistake shows up across most of your reads at that position, and naive majority-vote consensus won't fix it. You need a basecaller/consensus model trained to correct for those specific failure modes (which is exactly what the current-gen Guppy/Dorado models try to do), not just "more depth." That distinction matters a lot for a home setup: coverage is cheap, but knowing where your specific errors are systematic vs. random is what determines whether "buy more reads" actually gets you to clinical-grade accuracy or just gives you a very confident wrong answer.