Genetic testing is only useful if it's accurate and honestly communicated. Here's exactly how we handle both.
Sequencing runs through a lab partner certified under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) and accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) - the standard used by clinical-grade labs, not consumer novelty tests.
Every report is reviewed by a genetic specialist before it reaches you. Exome and Genome customers can also book a live consult with a certified genetic counselor.
Every reported variant is tagged by strength of evidence - strong, moderate, or preliminary - sourced from peer-reviewed literature and curated variant databases (ClinVar, PharmGKB, and equivalents), not single studies.
Full details live on our privacy page.
Your genome is the complete set of your DNA, about 3 billion letters long. In 2022 the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium published the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome (3.055 billion base pairs, from a cell line that lacked a Y chromosome). The Y chromosome was completed from a different individual in 2023. Only about 1-2% of the genome codes for proteins, which is the part an exome test reads.
The rest is far from empty. In 2012, the ENCODE project found biochemical activity across roughly 80% of the genome, including large stretches outside the 1-2% that codes for proteins. Much of this DNA helps control when and how strongly your genes are used. Scientists still debate how much of that activity truly matters. A 2020 update focused on the regions most likely to control genes and mapped about 926,000 of them, covering roughly 8% of the genome.
Any two people are about 99.9% identical, yet the 1000 Genomes Project found that a typical genome still differs from the reference at 4.1 to 5.0 million sites. Most of these variants are harmless, but some influence how a person's body works and which health risks deserve attention. This is why reading your own variants, rather than relying on population averages, is the starting point of personalized health.
Most of healthcare still works the same way it has for decades: something goes wrong, symptoms show up, and only then does treatment begin. It's a reactive model - and by the time it kicks in, some of the damage may already be done.
Genetics offers a different starting point. Instead of waiting for symptoms, a DNA test can flag certain health risks years - sometimes decades - before anything feels wrong. That's not about predicting your future with certainty. It's about giving you a head start.
A lot of the conditions genetics can flag don't announce themselves early. Cardiovascular disease, several cancers, and metabolic conditions like diabetes often develop quietly, with genetic risk sitting in the background long before any clinical sign appears. Someone can feel completely healthy and still be carrying a variant that meaningfully raises their risk for something specific - the kind of thing routine checkups wouldn't catch, because there's nothing yet to check for.
This is the gap proactive genetic testing is built to close: surfacing that risk while a person still has every option available to respond to it.
Here's something worth understanding about how genetic testing actually works: your DNA sequence itself doesn't change over your lifetime. What does change is how much we understand about it. Science's grasp of what a specific variant actually means - how significant it is, what it's linked to - keeps expanding.
That means a test taken once doesn't go stale. It's less like a single snapshot and more like a resource you can keep coming back to, as interpretation of the same underlying data improves over the years.
Learning you carry an elevated genetic risk can be unsettling - it's easy to read it as a fixed sentence, like your DNA has already decided your future. It hasn't. A genetic predisposition is not a diagnosis. It's information about probability, not certainty, and importantly, it's often something you can act on.
Take cardiovascular risk as an example: understanding a genetic predisposition toward heart disease doesn't mean it's inevitable. Paired with the right lifestyle adjustments and monitoring, that risk can often be meaningfully reduced. The knowledge becomes useful precisely because it points to where extra attention is worth focusing.
"Eat better, move more" is good advice for almost everyone - and almost impossible to act on with urgency, because it isn't about you specifically. Learning about a personal, identified risk changes that. A generic recommendation and a recommendation tied to your own biology carry very different weight, even when the underlying advice sounds similar.
This is especially true for hereditary cancer risk. Variants in genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 - linked to elevated risk of breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers - or genes associated with Lynch syndrome and colorectal cancer risk, don't diagnose cancer on their own. What they do is identify who may benefit from more active monitoring, so that if something does develop, it's caught at the earliest, most treatable stage rather than later.
Beyond disease risk, genetics plays a role in something more immediate: how your body responds to medication. This field - pharmacogenomics - looks at how genetic variation affects a drug's effectiveness and the likelihood of an adverse reaction. Without that information, finding the right medication or dose can still come down to trial and error in everyday clinical practice. With it, treatment decisions have more to go on from the start.
None of this is really about chasing a longer lifespan for its own sake. The more meaningful goal is a longer healthspan - more years spent in good health and independence, and a shorter stretch of life shaped by chronic illness. That shift depends on catching risk earlier, rather than only managing disease once it's already established.
This is the thinking behind Tunio. We sequence your DNA once, and turn what's found into a clear, individual report - not a population-wide guess, but a look at the variants that are actually yours. From there, you're equipped to have more specific, more useful conversations about your own health, long before symptoms would ever prompt you to.
Genetic testing does not diagnose any disease. It should not replace advice from a qualified healthcare professional - always consult your doctor about any health decisions based on a genetic report.
We'd rather you trust us because we're upfront, not because we oversell.
Most common conditions are shaped by genetics, environment, and lifestyle together. A raised genetic risk is a reason to pay closer attention - not a diagnosis, and not a guarantee.
Tunio reports are for general wellness and informational purposes. Significant findings should be confirmed through independent clinical testing and discussed with a physician or genetic counselor before any medical decision.