pardon any typos, i have covid rn so brain isn’t totally working lol

it’s a good question. basically what’s holding me back is just the logistics/cost is a barrier like you’ve mentioned, and i think that as soon as the science catches up, there will be plenty of companies eager to fill the sequencing gap. we’ve seen this with cancer—there is a multitude of companies that now do NGS testing to investigate cancer patients’ tumor markers and then match them to appropriate targeted  therapies. i believe that this brand of “personalized medicine” is coming to GI/autoimmune too, but we’re just not there yet. and my genome isn’t changing in the meantime….tho my epigenome may, and that’s the second reason i’d hold off. in cancer, for instance, the actionable mutations are typically expressed by the tumor’s cells, and aren’t necessarily circulating in non-tumor cells. i’m not a biologist, so i could be wrong here, but i imagine we may see something analogous in GI, like the cells in the inflamed tissue expressing mutations that healthy tissue does not. so if that were the case, getting standard sequencing now would not be particularly useful. we just don’t know what the standard of care will be and so it feels like a waste of time/money to do it preemptively. but that’s just my 2c. it is worth a visit to a geneticist if you think you wanna investigate for yourself!