Frequently Asked Questions

This site is a tool for anyone interested in better understanding polygenic scores. In practice, the two use cases for what we've built are individuals interested in learning more about their genetic predispositions, and parents interested in learning more about their embryos. It was for the latter group that this site was originally built. There are an increasing number of companies, such as Orchid Health and Genomic Prediction, which offer parents the ability to screen their embryos for disease risks. Unfortunately these companies do not offer predictors for other traits that contribute to quality of life, such as intelligence or educational attainment. This site aims to fix that by providing open source predictors that any parents or individuals can use. The Service is not a clinical test, medical advice, genetic counselling, or an approved embryo-selection system, and its results should not be used as the sole or primary basis for health or reproductive decisions.

Navigate to the Upload tab, click the 'Upload' button, and select your genomic data file. We currently accept 23andMe raw genotype files (.txt) up to 30 MB.

We currently support 23andMe raw genotype files (.txt), up to 30 MB. Other formats, including VCF, AncestryDNA and MyHeritage exports, are not supported yet.

You can request a copy of your embryo's genomes from the genetic testing company. Once you receive this data, you can upload it to this site to learn more about each embryo. You can then make a choice about which embryo to implant based on both the genetic predictors provided by the genetic testing company and the supplementary predictors provided by this site. The Service is not a clinical test, medical advice, genetic counselling, or an approved embryo-selection system, and its results should not be used as the sole or primary basis for health or reproductive decisions.

Commercial providers generally offer more accurate predictors because they use larger proprietary datasets, laboratory controls, professional interpretation, and more extensive validation. Genomic Commons is a free nonprofit alternative designed to make additional predictors accessible, not to match a clinical-grade product. Our predictors can provide useful comparative signals, but we cannot yet reliably quantify an expected IQ, health, or other gain from selecting among genomes.

Your results go through three stages. First, scientists study the DNA of hundreds of thousands of people and look for genetic variants that tend to show up more often in people with a certain trait. They figure out how much each variant nudges the trait up or down. This is done independently of our services and before you upload any genetic data. Second, we look at which of those variants you carry and add up all the nudges to get your raw polygenic score. Third, we compare your score to a reference population and tell you percentage of people you score above. If you're at the 75th percentile, your genetic predisposition is higher than about 3 out of 4 people in that reference group.

Heritability is how much of a trait is driven by genetics versus everything else. For height, genetics explains about 80% of why some people are taller than others. For something like depression, genetics plays a smaller role (around 30-40%), with life experiences mattering more. This matters because heritability sets the ceiling for how good any genetic predictor can be. If a trait is only 30% genetic, even a perfect predictor could only explain 30% of the picture. Traits that are both highly heritable and well-studied (like height) have the most reliable predictions.

When comparing multiple genomes, you can tell us which traits matter most to you using a 0–3 scale. Setting a predictor to 3 means 'this is very important to me,' while 1 means 'this matters less.' Setting it to 0 removes that trait from the comparison entirely. The overall score takes each genome's percentile for every predictor, factors in your weights, and averages them into a single number for easy ranking. Keep in mind: this score reflects what you said matters most—someone else with different priorities would get a different ranking from the same data.

The score represents how far above or below average a genome is across all selected traits. A positive score means better than average overall, zero means average, and a negative score means below average overall. Disease traits like cancer and diabetes are automatically inverted so that lower disease risk contributes positively. The score is centered around the 50th percentile (average), so even a 'good' genome can have a negative score if most of its traits fall below the 50th percentile.

Your genomic data is transmitted over HTTPS, and access through this site is restricted to your own account. It is not end-to-end encrypted: this site and the analysis service that computes your scores both read your file in order to process it. Your raw upload is deleted from our storage once it has been submitted for analysis.

You can request deletion of individual records or your account through the site. This deletes active database records and requests cleanup from storage and analysis systems. Complete erasure may be delayed by an unsuccessful provider cleanup, security logs, legal obligations, or a provider backup cycle. See the Privacy Policy for details or contact us if a deletion appears incomplete.