By Dave Goosselink
A former Otago farmer could become the first New Zealander to purchase a map of his DNA.
First-year genetics student Steve Anderson says he is willing to pay the $4,000 for his own genome sequence - a huge string of chemicals, about 3.2 billion base pairs long.
Mr Anderson will be the first private New Zealander to buy the unique sequence and says he believes DNA maps could have big medical advantages in the future.
“If you have a recessive disorder and you marry someone that also has that disorder, it'll quite likely spring up, there's a fair chance of it. If you have your genome sequenced, you could check on this and prevent that happening,” he says.
It will not be small – his DNA sequence will take up around 800 megabytes of raw data - but Professor Peter Dearden, head of Genetics Otago, says he has reservations about how much use the information will be.
“Trying to understand how you take that information and turn that into sensible information about whether you're going to get a disease, or not get a disease, is very difficult,” he says.
However Mr Anderson says he plans to study his own sequence and interpret what he’s made of.
3 News