How to Sequence Your Own DNA at Home
7th July 2026
If, of course, that’s what you want to do.
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
Cheek cells are easily accessible and replenish pretty quickly. They are not used for cancer diagnosis, inflammation, or what genes are being activated in other parts of the body (like if you have hives on your chest and want to test what genes are being expressed in the cells that are inflamed), since you would want to collect the cells having problems and compare them against other normal versions of those cells.
To sequence the cells, I bought lab materials and consumables to sequence my own genome at home. It took me about two months to get everything together to do a full end to end high quality run. Likewise, the costs are still out of reach for the average person but they are decreasing (exponentially!) and we will eventually have affordable technology, like a cell phone or AI, telling us about our DNA + RNA expression real-time.
Not quite as fun as building a mainframe, but still…