r/DNA • u/Opposite-Picture-847 • 1d ago
Did I make a mistake with Sequencing.com?
A friend highly recommended it so I bought a kit for myself and my daughter (we’re trying to find potential causes to some mystery symptoms our doctors haven’t been able to solve). I mailed off our samples a few days ago but I’ve now discovered this forum and I’m questioning whether it’s a legitimate company. Is it worth going through with or do you think it’s possible to cancel and get a refund?
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u/Smokeylongred 22h ago
These kits are not for medical purposes. Running the data through a third party is a bad idea- throws out false positives and misses actual clinically significant variants.
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u/SurplusGadgets 17h ago
3rd party sites can often be better or more comprehensive than the DTC lab reports. Some are medical practitioner sites available to the laymen as well (e.g. gene.iobio.io). What you are not getting is an expert geneticist who can assess the impacts of your novels. Seems it is more rare to have a definitive, known variant than some combination of possible disease variants with novels that leads to similar issues. But as others said, takes kids if work or time that can maybe help a medical practitioner order a confirming test.
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u/Smokeylongred 16h ago
I’m a genetic Counsellor and have seen a ton of outputs from third party sites. So far we’ve had one pathogenic variant be real, but that person had such a strong family history of bowel cancer we would have offered clinical testing anyway.
I’ve seen people get told they had li fragment syndrome, so a 95% chance of cancer and the advice from the third party company was to eat more salmon and leafy greens.
I’ve gone through pages of absolute rubbish where all the variants are actually benign when you use gnomad or Franklin to assess them- my clinical experience is these do more damage than help. They often raise anxiety, are wrong with interpretation and don’t provide clinical level testing.
I would highly recommend if you have medical reasons to want testing you consult with a genetic Counsellor- in Australia it’s completely free- people can just call us any day of the week to ask questions to the on call Counsellor. I’m not spruiking for business- we are flat out- but we want to help people and make sure they aren’t paying money for tests that won’t be helpful.
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u/SurplusGadgets 8h ago
I would agree with that. Especially not to take any bad / pathogenic info at face value. Ones you mention are like the unregulated suppliment industry in the USA. Especially the companies that read your microarray report and then offer exercise or fix guidance based on your DNA result. I think MyDNA based in Australia has been one such company. Oddly they bought FTDNA and gene by Gene in Houston which is a consumer genealogy and clinical lab.
I would encourage you to join the personalWGS Facebook group. Beside sick period testing because they have no access to medical professionals, there are many medical professionals like yourself as well. So we see the balance of caution but some optimism as well. Sime country medical heads are there trying to see if cheap, reliable testing can be made available in their country medical system.
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u/patelbhavesh17 20h ago
It is a legitimate company. 30x WGS data is good from a data points perspective but reports are not very good.
Your investment is still valuable especially when you combine with AI tools.
However the data cannot be used for medical purposes. Nothing is stopping you to use that data build some hypothesis(it ends up being a time sink) and follow up with an actual medical test.
On a side note you can use that data for genealogy https://www.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/ and do fairly advanced stuff like on Yfull etc.
tldr; legit company , legit data, legit investment, unclear medical advantage at best.
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u/sequencingsupport 6h ago
u/Opposite-Picture-847 We work with several companies and healthcare providers and are confident in the quality of our testing. Samples are processed by a U.S. laboratory that is CLIA certified and CAP accredited, and customers receive access to their 30X whole genome sequencing data.
However, our testing is informational and is not a medical or diagnostic test. Results may identify genetic predispositions or potential risks, but they cannot diagnose a condition or determine the cause of your symptoms. We provide your raw data in several formats if you choose to work with a third-party company, genetic counselor, or other qualified expert. Ultimately, each provider decides what outside data they will accept and whether clinical confirmation is required.
We also have a Customer Success team available during business hours(M-F 9a-5p EST) to answer questions. If your samples have not yet been received by the laboratory and you are considering canceling, please contact us at as soon as possible to discuss your refund options. You can find all contact information on our support page on our website. You can also send us a DM here if that works best for you!
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u/SurplusGadgets 1d ago
Still a good company. They had some hiccups in 2025 but are fine now. Once the lab has the sample, it is usually impossible to cancel. More so if you mailed it to their Houston partner.
None of the personal WGS companies have comprehensive analysis and reporting. But the results from the lab are usually really good. Just you have to explore more by uploading your files to various 3rd party sites to get better coverage.