Obtaining Whole Genetic Sequence As an end-user of my own data, specifically raw DNA sequence (WGS, whole genome sequencing). How or where do one obtain such DNA data so that a biology hobbyist can perform bioinformatics on this?
What keywords is best describe to the search engines when finding these online WGS websites).
It would be nice to have a USB stick mailed to me after such DNA HomeKit.  What file format is most commonly offered? (VCF?)
Am I looking too far ahead into the future?
&quot;DNA data&quot; comes in several forms dependent on the technology used to produce them.
Companies like 23andMe are using SNP chips and those are available for an only rather a limited number of species. To be completely honest, I don't even know what would be the raw data they would provide, but I would suspect it could be a vcf file.
If the chosen technology would be DNA sequencing. DNA sequencing is provided by a few dozen of sequencing centres around the world, some of them associated with universities. DNA sequencing generates files that contain individual sequencing reads with assigned quality scores (&quot;how much the sequencer trusts each base&quot;), the typical formats are fastq (Illumina) or .bam (long read technologies). Usually, you would also need to find a suitable reference in one of the public databases, for instance, the NCBI portal for human reference. Then map your reads and do variant calling. Of course, then it depends on what would you be interested in.
If you don't care for your own DNA and you are more interested in life around you, you can check ncbi for all sorts of genomic data. If you would be interested to understand how the raw sequencing data work, ebi is a good place to look. Also, in every single paper generating/using sequencing data you there should be mention where in public databases you can find them.
Finally, let me warn you. Some of the genomic analyses are quite computationally heavy (not all though). If you don't have a specific question in mind, it would be wise to start with bacterial sequencing.
Hope you will have fun with DNA data!