Genomics Blog

April 16, 2008 7:30 AM
My Code
Filed Under: Mikenomics


I've never been very good with spreadsheets. Setting up fornulas, numbering and ordering colums, or formatting rows is more X factor than it is Excel. You'll also recall that when I received my first test results from deCODE I was surprised there was not more information available. There is simply much more known than what seemed to be there.
I emphasize what SEEMED to be there.

A colleague in the office checked with deCODE to see if he could find out more and darned if they didn't point him to a
download button tucked off on the left hand navigation menu on deCODEme. A button that you can't bone up on prior to
getting your results and one that has no explanation until you click it.
I got more information all right.
An XL spreadsheet with 1,013,349 rows of information.
My spreadsheet nightmares were there in glorious black and white on my laptop with more than 1 million SNPs laid out
for me to study. For more on SNPs check Gerry Ward's Education Blog on the subject.
True to my past experience with spreadsheets, most of it makes absolutely no sense. A maze of data that looks
something like this:
Name            Variation  Chromosome   Position   Strand    YourCode
rs4477212       A/G              1                   72017       +             AA
rs2185539       C/T              1                   556738     +             CC


And on it goes for at least a million more lines. As I sit here with my laptop you can practically smell the smoke coming
off the spreadsheet as EXCEL 2007 churns out the lines when I unzipped the file. deCODE warns you that some
spreadsheets can't actually handle the file.
Still on a dial-up, have an old version of XL, or a slow computer? Find a plan B to deal with it because even the zipped file
doesn't zip across the ether with a pieces of the answer to your genetic puzzle.
deCODE offers little explanation around all this data so there is a lot of homework to do. One place to start is the 
SNPedia site. Yes, the wonderful world of wikis can be brought to bear on your genetic code.
Odd when you think about it. A couple of decades ago you couldn't build a person's genetic profile and something like a
wiki still wasn't a glint on a keyboard. And here they are together as a third party aid to a personal genotyping service.
If you're serious about having a personal genetic profile done by one of the commercial companies be equally serious
about the work involved. Your $1,000 buys you the data and a few clues about what's inside you. It doesn't buy a lot of
analysis and though deCODE promises more tools to come, right now it is a pretty small toolbox.
I still need to do a great deal more homework, but it is one of the more interesting and downright cool pieces of
information I've ever come across about myself.

Comments

cariaso - www.snpedia.com

http://www.snpedia.com/index.php?title=Promethease

is able to read your decodeme file, and produce a report similar to

http://www.snpedia.com/files/promethease/outputs/promethease-ngnomics.html

the information at

http://www.snpedia.com/index.php?title=DeCODEme

may also be of use

Mike Spear - www.genomealberta.ca/blogs

Thanks for this.

I was starting to go through the SNPedia site because it seems to be an excellent find for anyone working with deCODE. I will definitely give it a whirl.

Cheers,

Mike

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