Not sequencing!
Boonsri had a great article in Discover on this (glad to see the
link). One quick quibble: 23andMe does not sequence genomes
(yet). They use arrays to quickly test for presence/absence of
SNPs. This limits their approach to discovering only alleles that
they know of, only in regions that they focus on. So Church's
rare alleles will go completely missed.
And given that most GWAs are only finding a handful of
associations between phenotype and a common SNP that
explains a very minor amount of heritability, it's likely that multiple
rare alleles are the real culprits we would be interested in. Which
sucks, because that means that every unhappy disease is
unhappy due to its own genetic defect (to paraphrase Tolstoy).
