Blog

A breakdown of real 2026 prices for SNP arrays, exomes, and whole-genome sequencing, what each one measures, and the storage, compute, and interpretation costs that follow.

Cloning tools like SnapGene and Geneious answer a different question than personal genome analysis. A concrete stack for going from FASTQ to annotated variants, with the tools, flags, file formats, and failure modes that matter.

Pharmacogenetic testing reliably predicts how you metabolize a few dozen drugs, and says almost nothing about which antidepressant will work. Here is what the genes cover, how to call the star alleles yourself from whole-genome data, and where the calls break.

A technical answer to which genetic sites are worth uploading raw DNA to, what the array file contains, and how to run the same analyses yourself with plink, bcftools, and an imputation server.

A working method for turning a raw Libre or Dexcom export into an ambulatory glucose profile, per-meal response curves, and metrics you can defend — including what the numbers can and cannot tell you.

A map of the multi-omics vendor market in four layers, what files each layer hands back, and how to evaluate a provider if you want data you can analyze yourself.

A working guide to pulling your lab data out of patient portals, normalizing it into one machine-readable table, computing derived values yourself, and telling a real change from assay noise.

A technical comparison of PGx testing companies, what their panels genotype, where they fail on CYP2D6 and DPYD, and how to produce CPIC-grade diplotype calls yourself from whole-genome sequencing.

A working guide to taking personal RNA-seq FASTQ files through quality control, quantification, sample sanity checks, and longitudinal within-person expression analysis, with the commands and the failure modes.

A working guide to going from FASTQ or a count matrix to a UMAP embedding you can defend: normalization, PCA, neighbor graph settings, initialization, and what the picture does and does not tell you.

A palm-sized nanopore sequencer will sequence your DNA on your desk, but getting a usable human genome out of one takes several flow cells, a GPU, and a clear view of what long reads do well and badly. Here is the realistic path, with formats, inputs, and numbers.

A practical trimming workflow for personal whole-genome and RNA-seq FASTQs: how to find the real adapter, which tool and flags we use, how gently to trim, and how to verify that trimming helped rather than shifted your expression estimates.

A specific panel for athletes, the timing rules that make the numbers interpretable, the reference-change arithmetic that tells you when a shift is real, and how to get the data out of the lab in a computable form.

A working guide to the FASTQ layout, naming, and read structure Cell Ranger expects, how to produce those files from BCLs, how to verify them before you burn compute, and what to do when the pipeline says it found nothing.

DNA age tests read cytosine methylation at a few hundred CpG sites and regress it onto chronological age. Here is how the assay works, which clocks are worth running, what the error bars really are, and how to process the raw data yourself.

Heavy lifting and long endurance work can push ALT and AST into the hundreds with a healthy liver. Here is how to separate muscle-derived enzyme release from hepatic injury using GGT, CK, ALT/AST ratio, and a controlled retest.

A consumer epigenetics kit measures DNA methylation at CpG sites on an array, then feeds those values into a regression model that outputs an age-like number. Here is what the assay does, what the error bars are, and how to work with the raw IDAT files yourself.

A line-by-line breakdown of exome sequencing prices in 2026: raw-data-only versus clinical CLIA reports, what drives the spread, and what the files look like when they land.

A working guide to array genotyping versus whole-genome sequencing, the files you get, the tools to run on them, and the failure modes that make confident-looking results wrong.

Why total testosterone and SHBG rise together, how to work out whether your free testosterone is genuinely high, low, or normal, and which measurements are worth paying for.