What Is The Difference Between Genotyping And Sequencing

Imagine your DNA is like an entire book, where the A's, T's, C's and G's that make up your DNA are like the letters and words in a book.

In short, genotyping is like reading a some words on different pages while sequencing reads the entire book.

Genotyping determines which genetic variants an individual has. Genotyping chips provides the convenience of looking at many different genetic variants all at once, and it is an efficient and accurate way to do so. However, in order to provide useful insights, it would require the company providing the service to identify which genetic variants are of interest before doing genotyping.

Sequencing determines the exact sequence of your DNA. There are options to sequence short lengths of your DNA (known as exome sequencing) or the entire length of your DNA (known as whole genome sequencing). The first human genome that was sequenced cost about USD$1 billion and it took 13 years to complete. Currently, it costs roughly USD$1000-5000 and takes around 3 days (only sequencing, it does not include processing or interpretation time).

Advanx Health uses genotyping to analyse your DNA since it is an efficient and cost-effective way to identify genetic variations in individuals and across populations.