Have any of their participants, on LW or elsewhere, received their data?
Someone recently asked BGI Cognitive Genomics and received the following response (NB: most of that linked thread is about commercial sequencing using BGI’s lab, not about the BGI Cognitive Genomics study):
Whole genome sequencing is complete, but proper postprocessing of the data is taking longer than we had anticipated.
More precisely, I inspected the files we could have returned in June, and found that they did not distinguish between high-confidence reference genome matches and no-calls. This is a common trait of research pipelines handling WGS data, but it would have made for highly incomplete reports from third-party personal genomics tools. We are currently working on fixing this, but I cannot yet give a reliable ETA (at this point, “July” is a placeholder for “I don’t know yet”).
The website will be updated as soon as I do have a reliable ETA, and you will receive an email when your data is about to be available for download.
I’m often asked about the status of the BGI cognitive genomics project. [...] While I cannot give a comprehensive update, I can state that
Volunteers who qualified for the study via cog-genomics.org and returned their samples by approximately September 2012 have all been sequenced on the Illumina platform, and will receive updates on the status of their genomic data relatively soon.
The relationship between BGI and Illumina has deteriorated since the acquisition of Complete Genomics by the former, which was vigorously opposed (ostensibly on national security grounds, believe it or not) by the latter. Our project has not escaped collateral impact from this development.
Someone recently asked BGI Cognitive Genomics and received the following response (NB: most of that linked thread is about commercial sequencing using BGI’s lab, not about the BGI Cognitive Genomics study):
Earlier, on August 18, Steve Hsu wrote: