VentureBeat � Decoding 23andMe — Illumina spills the beans

VentureBeat � Decoding 23andMe — Illumina spills the beans: "The fundamentals aren’t too different from what Varsavsky has described previously. 23andMe customers will take a DNA sample — Flatley suggests it could involve either saliva or a cheek swab — and send it in to Illumina for genotyping. Instead of scanning the whole genome letter-by-letter, Illumina’s microbead-based scanners detect hundreds of single-letter DNA variations that give a useful but rough approximation of what the full genome would look like. (The upside is that scanning for these variations, technically known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, is far faster and cheaper than reading through the entire genome.) 23andMe would then throw that information up on a secure Web page, where users could then analyze it to their hearts’ content."