23andMe
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Revision as of 05:41, 7 December 2013 by Dan Tobias (Talk | contribs)
23andMe is a service that analyzes human genetic information (single-nucleotide polymorphism). It is currently fighting the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about their service of providing information about the likelihood of genetic disorders, which the FDA regards as an unapproved medical device, while others regard the FDA's stance as nanny statism. In the meantime, they're skipping the health-related information and providing only ancestry information and raw, uninterpreted genetic data.
File format
Raw genetic data is provided in the form of a tab delimited file (ZIPped up for distribution), containing the fields rsid, chromosome, position, genotype (e.g. rs3094315 1 742429 AG). Comment lines begin with the # character.
