Question

Can someone please send me information from reputable sources regarding these question below. Its really important.

How has technology developed to allow Commercial Genetic Testing

Compare initial genetic testing - slow, ineffective, expensive To now: fast, and cheap

What about the technology has developed to cause enable this?

Please make it specific to COMMERCIAL genetic testing

Answer 1

Technology has not yet reached a point where genetic testing is viable. The fundamental reason lies in the technique/technology used by different companies which again have the tendency to provide variable results. For ex: Say if one needs to identify their ancestry, results have proved that each commercial organization has different result to show. Thus, uniformity in terms of results are not obtained and reliability of each technology is questioned. However, it is possible that one amongst the results might be true but one can still go with a result based on the analysis of advancement of technology of that commercial organization. It can be difficult to determine the quality of a genetic test commercialized directly to the public. Some providers genetic tests are not CLIA-certified, so it can be difficult to tell whether their tests are valid in terms of overall results.

The previous technique/technology employed less automation and more human analysis that led to the results being provided slowly and may/may not be very accurate. However, with the advancement of technology in terms of say new variants of NGS, kayotyping results have been fast, providing more accurate picture of the overall results. The technique and the analysis using specialized softwares have become more automated with the advancing technology. And as pointed out that genetic testing at some stage will be really cheap, fast and more accurate to provide a complete picture of any abnormality, chances of disease (say cancer: to take the right precautions before an onset of a disease), ancestry etc