I got genomed by Illumina

In March 2014, my wife and I “got genomed” by enrolling in Illumina’s (now Genome Medical’s) Understand Your Genome (UYG) program. UYG requires participants to order this whole genome sequence (WGS) test from their physicians due to uncertainties surrounding the delivery of genomic results in the U.S. Illumina is careful to point out that the service “…has not been cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration” and “you will not receive medical results, or a diagnosis, or a recommendation for treatment.” Our family physician signed the request in November 2013, and we received our results in February. Fortunately, no surprises, but the UYG program only covers these Mendelian disorders for now. We flew to San Diego a few weeks later to listen to talks by genomic researchers and discuss our results with genetic counselors. As part of this one-day seminar, we each received an iPad Mini that was pre-loaded with our results, as well as a portable hard drive that contained our raw sequence data.

I received my WGS data on this encrypted hard drive (about 100GB).

After we arrived home, the next step was to find a public “home” for my sequence data (to share without restrictions). What I learned is that uploading your genome anywhere is a challenge, mostly because the dataset is so big.

I looked at Dropbox, Evernote and Figshare, but their storage models do not scale well for genomic data. I tried Sage Bionetworks, but the BAM file was too large to upload. I settled on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and created an anonymous FTP server using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

About my whole genome sequence data

My genome data and results are now in the public domain, freely available to download under a Creative Commons (CC0) license. Uploading the data took two days over a 3Mbps connection, so you may want to read the clinical report and sample report instead.

• ftp://ftp.startcodon.org <– I decommissioned the ftp server
• username: anonymous
• password: guest

• BAM file checksum: 2529521235 (78.1GB uncompressed)
• VCF file checksum: 4165261022 (2.4GB gzip compressed)

Questions about FTP? See this FAQ.

Now that I have my genome in the cloud, I’ll start playing with analysis tools like STORMSeq. Stay tuned!

My WGS data is now available on Amazon S3

Read the blog post