Understand Your DNA: A Guide

Are you considering to test your own DNA? Do you want to learn more about your health and ancestry? Understand your DNA — A Guide is about what you can use genetics for. For a few hundred dollars, you can now scan your own genes. Millions of people all over the world have already done so. Everyone wants to see what they can get to know about themselves, and the market growing rapidly. But what does it require from you? And what can you really use a DNA test for? Understand your DNA — A Guide helps you put the plots and charts of consumer genetics into perspective and enables you to figure out what’s up and down in the media headlines. The book is also a key input for today’s debate about what we as a society can and want to do with medical genetics. Genetics will play a growing role in the future. Understand your DNA — A Guide is an easy-to-read and necessary guide to that future. The book is provided with a foreword by Professor Sham Pak-Chung of Hong Kong University.

While there are many books about genetics, they typically take the perspective of a scientist wanting to understand the molecular levels. At the same time, direct-to-consumer genetics is a booming market, with millions of people already tested. Very little has been published that will guide them for real, because the need here is more focused on medical and practical understanding, than focussed on molecules.

This book therefore aims to hit that vacant spot in the market. It’s a walk-through of all concepts that are necessary to understand in your own analysis. Meanwhile, it is also limited in scope to only those concepts — thus distinguishing it from broader works.

The book is appropriate for the readerships in modern multi-ethnic metropolises because it mixes European and Asian examples, both from the collaboration between the author from Europe and the foreword-writer, Prof. Pak Sham of Hong Kong University. But also, because many of the examples in the book concerns differences and similarities between Asian and European ethnicities, something the author believes is a trend in time.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. My Daughter’S Hair Colour
Chapter 2. Basic Introduction To Genetics
Chapter 3. Methods In Consumer Genetics
Chapter 4. Ancestry And Genealogy
Chapter 5. Rare Disease Genetics — One Snp At A Time
Chapter 6. Genetics Of Common Traits And Diseases — Many Snps Together
Chapter 7. The Future
Appendix A Operating Instructions for Impute.me