Blog

What China's commercial health insurance innovative drug list is, which drugs may apply to it, and what a place on the list gives.

What whole-genome screening in a healthy adult finds, what it misses, which files and tools to use, and where the interpretation gets hard enough that you need a clinician.

List prices for SomaScan 7K and 11K at core facilities run $800–900 per sample before shipping, plate minimums, and analysis. Here is where that money goes, how the assay works, and how to decide between SomaScan, Olink Reveal, and a targeted panel.

A working pipeline that turns 30x whole-genome FASTQ or CRAM into a filtered and annotated variant call set, with the tools and checks we would use.

A practical walkthrough from FASTQ to gene-level counts, cell-composition estimates, and pathway scores, written for someone analyzing their own blood RNA-seq rather than a two-group experiment.

A technical comparison of array-based consumer DNA tests, consumer whole-genome sequencing, and clinician-ordered panels: file formats, error modes, prices, and what to do with the raw data.

A price breakdown of array genotyping, panels, exomes, and whole genomes, what each price includes, and what you get back as files.

Mean platelet volume is a derived number from a fitted histogram, and it drifts with tube age and analyzer model. Here is how to tell a real low MPV from a preanalytical artifact, and what to measure alongside it.

How to get pharmacogenomic (PGx) results at home, why sequencing beats the saliva-kit panels for most genes, and how to run PharmCAT, Aldy, and HLA typing over your own data without over-reading the output.

A practical guide to designing, quantifying, and modeling a longitudinal RNA-seq series from one person — sampling schedule, salmon quantification, spline and impulse models, trajectory clustering, and the confounders that will ruin the result if you ignore them.

A technical review of consumer and clinical whole genome sequencing: coverage depth, file formats, variant calling limits, and what the data can and cannot tell you.

A working pipeline for analyzing the SNPs in your own whole-genome sequence: alignment, variant calling with DeepVariant, QC thresholds that catch real failures, annotation, and the queries worth running first.

What a CGM measures, which over-the-counter sensor to buy and how to export the raw data as CSV. Covers the metrics and failure modes that matter.

A gene panel is a subset of an exome, and an exome is about 1.5% of a genome. Here's how the three differ in coverage, cost, file sizes, and what you can re-analyze later.

A genome explorer is a coordinate browser plus a query layer over your own alignments and variant calls. Here is the stack we would use on a personal 30x whole genome, with the commands, file formats, and failure modes.

"Genome manager" usually means a vendor's web portal for your sequencing results. Here is what that portal does, what it hides, and how to run your own catalog of VCFs, BAMs, expression matrices, and lab panels with tools you already know.

A step-by-step guide to taking 30x WGS FASTQs from a vendor portal to an annotated, QC-checked variant call set using spot instances, bwa-mem2, DeepVariant, and Nextflow. Includes real costs, memory requirements, and the failure modes that waste a weekend.

A working guide to the five standard inflammation markers, from hs-CRP to IL-6. Covers what each tracks, noise in a single value and sample handling.

A Nature Medicine study staged 80 midlife women by hormone criteria and found 16 blood proteins that track the menopause transition better than age does. What the menopause proteomic score measures, how well it replicated, and what the dementia numbers do and do not support.

What post-meal glucose looks like in people without diabetes, where the 140 and 180 mg/dL thresholds come from, and a protocol for extracting real numbers from your own CGM export.