With the recent $99 price point for 23andMe many of my friends have purchased kits (finally!). 23andMe's interpretive results are pretty rich now, but there are still things missing. There are plenty of third party tools you can use, but I know some people might want to do their own data analysis. There are many ways you could go about this, but I want to put up some posts on DIY genomic data analysis to making the learning curve a little less steep, and get people started. Motivation to actually begin going down this road is a big issue, but I think once you get over the hump it gets a lot easier. First, you need Plink. It is really preferable that you work on a Mac or in Linux to engage in heavy duty analysis, but in this post I'll assume you are working on the Windows platform. Again, the point here is to make this accessible. Download Plink if you don't have it, and extract it where ever you like. Plink is a command line tool, which means that you need to into the folder with the old MS-DOS interface. So use the cd command to get into that folder. Here is a screenshot of my shell:
The selection "plink --noweb --bfile PhyloF --genome" is a command that I entered. It is not part of the directory structure. If you don't know about the cd command, please see the Wikipedia entry. It's really just a simple way to step through the directory structure of your files and folders.
