I had my whole genome sequenced mostly out of curiosity.
I have a background in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Copenhagen, and I’ve always been interested in health, prevention, longevity, and the idea of using better data to make better decisions.
So whole-genome sequencing sounded interesting.
If you can sequence almost all of your DNA, surely there must be something useful hidden in there. I wondered whether it could tell me more specifically how I should eat, train, sleep, or what I should pay more attention to as I get older.
I probably expected something closer to a personalized recipe book for living better and, hopefully, longer.
That wasn’t really what I got.
There is a huge amount of information. Some of it is genuinely interesting, and some of it seems to confirm things I already knew about myself. But I didn’t find anything particularly worrying, and I didn’t make any major lifestyle or health decisions because of the results.
That was probably the biggest lesson from having my genome sequenced.
The data is personalized. What you can actually do with it is much less straightforward.
What You Actually Get From Whole-Genome Sequencing
Once my results were available, the first thing that surprised me was simply how much there was to look through.
My Dante Labs dashboard contains more than 175 clinical reports, while the platform describes the whole-genome sequence as supporting more than 200 reports overall.
The clinical section covers a wide range of areas, from cardiovascular and neurological conditions to metabolism, sleep, nutrition, and more.
There is also family-planning information covering inherited conditions.
Then there are the more lifestyle-oriented reports:
- Nutrigenetics
- Sports & Performance
- Sleep & Chronotype
- Clinical Ancestry
- Family Planning
- Raw genetic data
So you do not just receive a giant genetic file and get left to work it out yourself. Dante tries to translate the data into understandable reports.
That is an important part of the product.
The Dashboard Looked More Alarming Than the Details
My dashboard also showed a number of results under “Need attention.”
That sounds slightly alarming at first. But when I opened the individual reports, I did not find anything that made me think I had uncovered a serious medical problem or needed urgent follow-up.
A genetic finding is not the same thing as a diagnosis. Dante also notes that its reports cover specific variants and statistical associations, and that lifestyle, environment, and overall health can outweigh the effect of an individual variant.
I expected the lifestyle advice to be more personalized
This was probably the biggest difference between what I imagined before doing the test and what I actually received.
The genetic analysis can be extremely specific.
A report can tell me exactly which gene is being examined, the SNP involved, which genotype I have, and what published research has associated that genotype with.
Then you reach the section explaining what you can actually do about it.
That is where things often become much more familiar.
My caffeine report, for example, says I am an intermediate caffeine metabolizer.
The practical recommendation is to experiment with caffeine timing and pay attention to how it affects sleep.
I do think I may be somewhat sensitive to caffeine, particularly if I drink too much later in the day. But I already had a reasonable idea that drinking a lot of coffee in the afternoon probably wasn’t helping my sleep.
My FTO result is another example.
The report says I do not carry the tested risk alleles at that locus, but the recommendations still come back to things such as protein, fiber, exercise, sleep, and meal timing.
Those are sensible recommendations.
I just didn’t nee