I don’t think of selection as genetic design. Sperm banks do selection based since their inception.
It would surprise me if there isn’t a sperm bank out there that already does 23andMe type genetic screening.
Still $20 dollar doesn’t buy you an hour of qualified physician time, so the price of the procedure is likely higher.
In mice, of course, gene splicing is commonplace and pretty cheap, although in the case of laboratory mice there is the freedom that you can abort the fetus at any stage if it shows signs of improper development, and in gene splicing experiments you typically have to abort a lot of fetuses.
Around five years ago I heard from a professor that the cost of getting a new gene manipulated mouse is roughly a PHD project and there are mouses dying in the process.
I suggest reading the link I posted plus other material on genomic selection. The type of genomic selection used in the dairy industry is very different from simple 23andMe type genetic screening.
I read the abstract.
The link says they do 50,000 SNP’s with their chip in the dairy industry. 23andMe does hundred thousands of SNPs according to their website.
They do some statistics with that data because to see which SNPs are important but otherwise I don’t see what they do much different.
High SNP numbers are misleading and have little predictive value. But that’s not the important bit; the important bit is how this information is actually used.
I don’t think of selection as genetic design. Sperm banks do selection based since their inception. It would surprise me if there isn’t a sperm bank out there that already does 23andMe type genetic screening.
Still $20 dollar doesn’t buy you an hour of qualified physician time, so the price of the procedure is likely higher.
Around five years ago I heard from a professor that the cost of getting a new gene manipulated mouse is roughly a PHD project and there are mouses dying in the process.
I suggest reading the link I posted plus other material on genomic selection. The type of genomic selection used in the dairy industry is very different from simple 23andMe type genetic screening.
I read the abstract. The link says they do 50,000 SNP’s with their chip in the dairy industry. 23andMe does hundred thousands of SNPs according to their website.
They do some statistics with that data because to see which SNPs are important but otherwise I don’t see what they do much different.
High SNP numbers are misleading and have little predictive value. But that’s not the important bit; the important bit is how this information is actually used.