Genetics, longevity and mycology, read carefully.

Not today, but we are working on technology that will radically change the cost structure of genome sequencing. Follow our journey and learn with us along the way.

Reading all of your DNA rather than a selected subset. A chip-based test genotypes a few hundred thousand positions chosen in advance; sequencing reads the whole text, which means new questions can be asked of the same data later without a new sample.

Each position is read about thirty independent times. That redundancy is what makes a single-letter difference trustworthy: a sequencing error shows up in one read, a real variant shows up in all of them.

Because fungi solved a chemistry problem our cells cannot. Over decades, tissue accumulates crosslinks that no human enzyme can break, and the network they hold together stiffens into something close to glass. Fungi are the only organisms that learned to cut bonds like these: when lignin appeared 300 million years ago, nothing on Earth could break it down until white-rot fungi evolved the enzymes to do it. Yeast also gave us much of the early work on cellular ageing. darkMatter’s thesis on aging starts from that record.

For most conditions, no. It tells you where you sit relative to others, which is most useful when it changes a decision — when to start screening, whether a borderline treatment is worth it. We will keep saying that even when it is less exciting than the alternative.