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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

You're right, it's not as simple as I described.

But (my bio is rusty) a haploid genome (gamete) cannot fully represent the genome of a diploid human.

If you're looking for genetic disorders, these will often be the result of recessive traits, right? So having only half of the chromosome sets is not indicative.

That's my example of hair color. With a full genome sequence, you could determine the person's hair color, but with a haploid genome, you could not.

If OP's joke is about the privacy implications of sperm donation, then saliva seems more risky.

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> a haploid genome (gamete) cannot fully represent the genome of a diploid human

Correct; my broader point was that when most people refer to a "human genome" it is ambiguous whether they mean diploid or haploid unless specified. Metrics like "3 billion base pairs" etc. actually describe the haploid human genome.

> If you're looking for genetic disorders, these will often be the result of recessive traits, right? So having only half of the chromosome sets is not indicative.

Often, but not always; there are myriad autosomal dominant disorders, as well as sex-linked disorders which require only a single mutant allele on X

> If OP's joke is about the privacy implications of sperm donation, then saliva seems more risky.

Here I think both with STR and SNP profiling you are equally at risk (i.e., saliva is not more risky)

From what I've read, recessive genetic disorders tend to be worse, but there are plenty of dominant and polygenic disorders with * varying degrees of penetrance.

* This I think indicates some other genetic and/or environmental factors we don't have a good grasp of.

A single sperm cell can't. But you presumably have an awful lot of them in a single sample. So this seems irrelevant to the privacy concerns being discussed here.

...and that's what I said. It would be more difficult than from saliva.

Yes but in context this is completely irrelevant. The context was originally the privacy implications of donating sperm. And those are definitely real.

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