Burn your genes on CD -- for $500,000

An anonymous reader writes "Venter says he plans to offer the service, with the goal of burning individual human's entire DNA sequences onto shiny compact discs. It will cost about $500,000 per person, says the entrepreneurial scientist who helped decode the human genome. "

Oh, the price has gone down.

[titurel]

From this first post [slashdot.org]: "Craig Venter, Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2000 has a new hobby: collecting rich people's DNA. Millionaires are lining up to buy their personal gene maps for the cool price of USD$621,500."

One flaw, not everything is on the CD.

[wackybrit]

Clever as he may be, his service does not provide a way that every detail about your DNA structure can be put onto CD. What will be on the CD is a large data file containing the pattern of how your DNA is built up, which chemicals are where, and so forth. However, what will be missing is the important data about how each chemical that forms your DNA is made up ITSELF.

So you'll get your CD alright, but the only people who could actually do anything productive with that data is the same company who made the CD for you! They have to keep the information about the chemical densities of DNA fragments on their own computers, since you need to have actual samples of the chemicals to do this, and you can't store chemicals on a CD.. only references to them!

It's like saying you can store a house on a CD. Sure, you can store the floor plan, and even the absolute position of every brick, but you can't store information about the chemical structure of the bricks or the glass. You take house plans and buy the parts from a building merchant.

Likewise, the genomes on the CD are just like architectural plans on building DNA, but you'd need to go to a 'DNA building merchant' like the scientist's fine company to actually find out what chemicals are referenced in the plans.

Unfortunately there's no way around this, and the guy offers a great service.. but just remember, while he's the only company out there, he pretty much has a stranglehold over the data you'll be taking away from him.

Re:how big is the entire genome?

[Captain Nitpick]

like, is it 1 cd(i find it hard to believe, but not that hard) or 30? 1000?

Sources say there's about 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. If we assume a reasonably efficient encoding scheme, we can get 4 base pairs into a normal 8-bit byte without compression. This gives us a total data size of a little over 700 megabytes, uncompressed. Run it through gzip, and you could probably fit it onto one cd, definitely 2.

Say what?

[roystgnr]

"Each chemical that forms your DNA" is adenine, guanine, cytosine, or thymine, and we've known the chemical structure of all those for decades.

Re:how big is the entire genome?

[treat]

ike, is it 1 cd(i find it hard to believe, but not that hard) or 30? 1000?

This website [ornl.gov] says that we have about 3 billion base pairs, 30 thousand of which are genes (the rest is the mysterious "junk dna"). There are 4 base pairs, therefore each base pair is 2 bits of data. That's about 7.5kb for all the genes, and 715MB for every base pair - which after compression should fit comfortably on a standard CD.

Re:I wonder...

[jetlag11235]

Many links can be found at:
linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/dna_corr/music.html

I can't say that I tried them all ... but one link near the bottom was rather interesting. Thymine in particular is worthy of checking out. AIFF format.
www.healingmusic.org/SusanA/order.html

What are you talking about?!?!?

[acidfast7]

As a biochemist/microbial physiologist this post TOTALLY BAFFLES me.

As another person who replied to this, I'd like to reiterate that the chemical composition of DNA is known. Composed of four different nucloside triphosphates (GATC) in an dynamically ordered structure.

If I follow your train of thought, than all of genomes that are sequenced are worthless to me and the scientific community because we aren't "the same company who made the CD".

Look here [nih.gov] at the National Center for Biotechnology Infortaion's Genomic Database. I'd assume you would receive something similar to this from Venter's group.

Also one can FREELY browse the human genome [nih.gov] and look for differences between your genome and those used to construct this draft of the genome.

Midochondrial DNA not on CD; DNA not whole story

[goombah99]

Although the parent to this post is a Troll. He is unfortunately correct, but not for reasons he cites. A cell has many components that are inherited from your mother that are not contained in the DNA. THe simplest and most profound of these is your Midochondial DNA. Midochodria are organelles that live symboitically inside every cell in your body. They are your main source of energy (ATP), and the cell is the Midochodia's only source of food. Both die without each other. Midochondia have their own private DNA which is not contained in the Cell's nucleous. You get your midochondia from your mother's egg (thus you and she have gentically identical midochondrial DNA.

More speculatively, there may be other things we dont know about yet that get a free ride from mother to child. To be very speculative, certain protein sets might very well influence the exprression of your genome. That is to say different developement.

This is not an unreasonable hypothesis, despite its high degree of speculation. Your and my Genonomes are so similar it is reasonable to suppose our differences arrise in part from HOW the genese are expressed. Expression is regulated by proteins in the cell that contains the DNA. Thus implanting your genome in another cell might not produce the same phenotype individual despite the common DNA.

Re:how big is the entire genome?

[the gnat]

Yes and no. I just tried gzipping chromosome 22 (one of the smallest) - it goes from 35MB to 10MB. The entire genome is about 3.5GB. However, keep in mind that the repetition isn't perfect, because from what I understand repeat motifs are more like regex's than simply the same sequence over and over again. A custom compression scheme could probably do much better than gzip.