The Genetic Early Adopters

September 8, 2008 | Source: Technology Review

Anyone with $350,000 to spare can now have his or her own genome sequenced by Cambridge, MA startup Knome — delivered on an eight-gigabyte USB drive.

Cheaper personal-genomics services are already available, offering analysis of hundreds of thousands of genetic variations, to predict risk of disease or assess ancestry and other traits. But Knome sequences the entire genome–nearly all three billion bases.

Knome aims to sequence 20 genomes this year, and has likely accumulated the largest repository of whole-genome information in the world.