NGS Expert Blog

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A social network wants to sequence your gut microbiome. The non-profit programme MyMicrobes, is inviting people to have their gut bacteria sequenced for about €1,500. Acting as both, social network and DNA database, the website offers a place for people to share diet tips, stories and gastrointestinal woes with one another. In exchange, researchers hope to gather a wealth of data about the bacteria living in peoples guts.

The same team of researchers showed earlier this year that people fall into one of three groups, or enterotypes, when it comes to the genetics of their gut bacteria (Gut study divides people into three types).

So far, the team has found links between certain gut-specific genetic markers and obesity and other diseases. And they suspect that gut enterotypes might affect how people react to different drugs and diets.

The group has been careful not to make promises to project participants. The research is still in its infancy, and there is no proven link between enterotypes and disease remedies. But the researchers hope the project will provide a bounty of data while helping volunteers connect with one another. Participants will have access to their own data, but all public results will be anonymous.

What is your opinion? Are you ready to sequence your gut microbiome?

In an interview published in the online version of Germany’s well-known weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, the medical ethicist and philosopher Prof. Urban Wiesing describes the concern of German scientists’ about some companies that offer analysis of private genome data via the internet.

As today’s gene diagnostics provide in most cases only information about increasing or decreasing risk of developing multifactorial diseases like lung cancer, diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease, he states that these results are in most cases only of limited informative value. Body weight, eating habits as well as physical activities often do tell much more about the risk of developing e.g. diabetes type II.
Nevertheless Prof. Wiesing thinks that such tests will be worth consideration once the predictive value gets better in the future. Today he compares the informational value of such tests with an oracle.

The researchers are most worried about the fact that customers of such companies receive critical results without any face to face consultancy from medical experts. They share our opinion that it is absolutely necessary to explain these complex results and the implications they MAY have for the life of the patients (and their families) in an appropriate way. It is not without reason that such internet companies are forbidden in Germany.

What is your opinion? Would you like to know that e.g. your risk for developing diabetes type II is 30% higher than on average? Do you think you really would change your lifestyle in that case?

9 years after the publication of the mouse reference genome (C57BL/6J) researchers from UK, US and Germany published in Nature the genomes of another 17 mouse strains.

For a wide range of applications the mouse reference genome C57BL/6J has only been of limited use because a huge variety of strains are used in the mouse laboratories worldwide. According to the researchers  the selected strains comprise the most commonly used strains of mice and their progenitors. Therefore the accessibility to the new genome sequencing data is a great step forward in the mouse research community.

Each of the 17 strains was sequenced to on average 25-fold coverage with Illumina sequencing technology. The 100 bp reads were mapped with high stringency to the reference mouse genome. When comparing the sequences that could be mapped uniquely on the mouse reference genome the researchers identified as much as 56.7 million SNPs in the 17 strains. Interestingly, this is almost an order of magnitude higher than the researches have expected based on earlier targeted resequencing studies. The published SNP data will be an excellent tool for mouse geneticians when looking on gene expression regulation and phenotype variations.

According to the GenomeWeb article the researchers plan to sequence even more strains and perform more de novo assemblies. Great news for all mouse researchers.

During my routine scan through the news on GenomeWeb I encountered an interesting article from Christie Rizk Knowledge of Genome Can Both Simplify and Complicate Knowledge of Self. This article is about the book My Beautiful Genome from Lone Frank who is a scientific journalist with Ph.D. in neurobiology.

On the homepage of Lone Frank you can find a sneak peek and these 6 pages contain already so many insights into human thinking and facts about the genome, that you really start thinking about your genome. Would you really like to know, if you had a hereditary disease? On the other hand it might be an extremely happy moment in your life when you learn that you don’t have a specific gene variant that is present in one of your parent’s genome.

I totally agree that we need research on the genome, since we need to know more about genes and their impact on our lives. In your private life your personal genome can provide information whether there is increased risk for a selection of hereditary diseases. Despite that it is still your decision and responsibility whether and to what extent you like to work with your personal data, isn’t it?

Knowing one’s genome may however also a fatal decision. What, if you find out a predisposition for a disease that cannot be treated?  This may even cause severe psychological problems .  In this context it is frightening that  some companies try to make money with dubious tests that have no scientific justification. What do you think?