No lab coat required — the DNA testing is already done by the time I get involved. My part starts with a text file and ends with something you'd actually want to read. Here's the whole journey.
Companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA will export your raw genotype file on request. It looks like the snippet on the right: one row per genetic marker — an ID, a location in the genome, and the two letters you inherited, one from each parent. A typical file holds 640,000+ rows.
Most people never open it. Understandably — it's a phone book written in a four-letter alphabet.
Each marker worth discussing gets checked against peer-reviewed literature: what the gene does, what this exact variant has been shown to change, in which populations, and how strong the evidence actually is.
This is the slow, joyful part — and the part where discipline matters. Weak or contradictory findings get labeled as such or left out. No horoscopes.
Findings get organized into ten themed reports — the "biology user manual." Every section follows the same honest rhythm: what the gene does → what your variant means → what, if anything, to do about it.
Each genotype call lists the exact position in the raw file it came from, so anyone can audit any line. Priorities are color-coded so the important things surface first.
CYP1A2 is the liver enzyme that clears caffeine. The demo profile carries one slow variant — coffee lingers for hours longer than it does for fast metabolizers…
Ten reports are thorough; nobody re-reads them on a Tuesday morning. So everything collapses into one living dashboard — wellness scores, trait cards, a searchable gene table — plus a ten-item daily protocol that fits on a sticky note.
The fastest way to ruin a good hobby is to oversell it. So let's be precise.
How you likely process caffeine, alcohol, and certain medications. Which nutrients you may need more of, and which form your body prefers. Whether you lean toward power or endurance muscle fibers. How your stress and reward chemistry tends to run. Where a little extra prevention is a smart bet.
Whether you will or won't get a disease — genes are one ingredient, not the recipe. It can't diagnose anything, replace bloodwork, or outrank your doctor. Consumer chips also read a sample of your genome, not all of it, and the occasional read is simply wrong. That's why the work cites markers — so it can be checked.
A fully interactive dashboard and real report pages — all built on "Alex M.", the invented demo profile.