A1c and glucose disagree when either your glucose sampling is unrepresentative or your red cell biology and hemoglobin assay distort the glycation measurement. Here is how to separate the two with CGM data, a CBC, an assay method check, and a look at your genome.
A technical walkthrough of DNA methylation testing. Compares arrays, bisulfite sequencing and nanopore, then covers the IDAT pipeline and clocks.
Two very different assays are sold under the name 'methylation panel': a one-carbon biochemistry blood panel and a DNA methylation assay. Here is what each one measures, which files you get, and how to process them yourself.
A technical guide to preventive genetic testing: which variants have actionable evidence, why sequencing depth and file format matter, and how to work with your own VCF without over-reading it.
A working guide to taking personal proteomics data from raw instrument files or NPX tables to a quantitative matrix, QC'd and normalized, and then to within-person statistics you can defend.
A practical guide to correlating genes, samples, and timepoints in personal RNA-seq data: which transform to use before computing a coefficient, how to filter, how to handle confounders, and how to correlate expression against proteomics, labs, and continuous glucose data.
A concrete walkthrough of bulk RNA-seq: where to get a real example dataset, what the files contain, how to quantify with salmon, and how to get to a gene-level table you can interpret, including the case where you only have your own samples.
A practical pipeline for turning your own bulk RNA-seq FASTQs into quantified gene and transcript expression, with the tool choices, flags, QC thresholds, and failure modes that matter for a single-person longitudinal dataset.
A step-by-step pipeline from raw FASTQ to a filtered, benchmarked VCF for a single human genome, with the tool choices, parameters, and quality checks we would use.
A step-by-step pipeline for taking a 4-5 million variant single-sample VCF and reducing it to a few dozen candidates, with the actual bcftools, ANNOVAR, and slivar commands, plus where the filters lie to you.
A technical assessment of the consumer blood panel companies: who runs the assays, what the $349-$499 membership buys, how to get structured data out, and why a 100-biomarker panel flags something for almost everyone.
Three different things get called a DNA clock. This page covers the epigenetic age clock, which assay to run and how to compute the score yourself.
A practical walkthrough of going from FASTQ, BAM/CRAM, and VCF files to an actual nucleotide sequence you can read, translate, and check against the reads it came from.
A step-by-step guide to taking a protein abundance matrix, building a defensible ranking statistic, and running over-representation and rank-based enrichment in R, including how to read a negative enrichment score.
A comparison of the companies that will sequence or map your genome, what data each one hands back, and how to judge an offer by coverage, read length, and file deliverables rather than marketing copy.
What whole-genome sequencing results contain, which files matter, how to interpret a variant classification, and where the analysis stops and a clinician starts.
A working guide to building the handful of plots that matter for a personal molecular dataset: coverage tracks, variant pileups, copy-number profiles, expression MA and volcano plots, and a genome-wide circular summary. With real commands, file formats, and the failure modes that produce misleading pictures.
A practical guide to wearing a continuous glucose monitor around training: sensor placement, interstitial lag, exporting raw CSV data, the metrics worth computing, and the artifacts that will fool you.
A working guide to running KEGG enrichment on personal RNA-seq: quantification, identifier mapping, GSEA versus over-representation, reading the maps, and the failure modes that make most pathway results meaningless.
What array, exome, and whole-genome testing each measure, which files to insist on, and a concrete pipeline for calling and annotating your own variants.