Processing Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Data from Major Industry Platforms including 23andme, AncestryDNA

This chapter describes how to use direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic data from major industry platforms, including 23andme, AncestryDNA, and more (MyHeritageDNA and FamilyTreeDNA). We first start with a brief introduction and history of these platforms and then describe what single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are and how they are used in genetics. We will introduce a publicly available dataset called OpenSNP that contains both genetic and phenotypic information free to use for the public. We will cover how to write and utilize functions in R to processing genetic data from multiple platforms (23andme, AncestryDNA) in standardized, reproducible ways. We will also cover how to develop tailored functions for utilizing phenotypic data from OpenSNP. You will learn how to write functions that enable one-hot encoding of categorical variables. You will also be able to illustrate the differences in algorithmic logic between design choices based on categorical data and one-hot encoding data cleaning functions. After reading this chapter, you should be able to confidently answer the following questions: