Spit in a tube. Wait 12 weeks. Read your genome.

Step 1

Order the kit.

You buy the Dante Labs Genome Test on their site. Shipping is free worldwide. The kit arrives in a padded envelope with a saliva collection tube, a stabilising liquid capsule, a barcode-linked ID sticker, an instruction card, and a prepaid return label.

Register the kit's barcode against your account before you spit. This is the single most common cause of results being delayed or lost — an unregistered sample cannot be linked back to a person and the lab has no way to match it to you after the fact.

Step 2

Collect the saliva sample.

The kit needs about 2 ml of saliva, which is roughly a quarter-teaspoon. Don't eat, drink, smoke, chew gum, or brush your teeth for 30 minutes before collection — food particles and toothpaste can contaminate the sample enough to fail sequencing.

Spit into the tube until the liquid reaches the fill line (foam doesn't count — wait for the bubbles to settle). Break the buffer capsule into the tube, seal it, invert several times to mix. The buffer stabilises the DNA at room temperature so the sample can survive weeks in the mail without refrigeration.

Drop it in the mail with the prepaid label. The lab is in L'Aquila, Italy; from the US and UK this typically adds 5–10 days of transit before sequencing begins.

Step 3

Sequencing at the lab.

Dante's lab runs Illumina NovaSeq X sequencers — the current-generation clinical instrument, released 2023. The sample goes through a defined pipeline:

1. DNA extraction. The lab breaks open cells from the saliva sample and isolates the DNA using magnetic-bead chemistry.
2. Library preparation. The extracted DNA is fragmented into millions of short pieces (~350 base pairs each) and given adapter sequences that let the sequencer read them.
3. Sequencing. The prepped library is loaded onto a NovaSeq X flow cell. The instrument reads the fragments in parallel, producing billions of short-read sequences. At 30× coverage, each position in your genome ends up read an average of 30 times.
4. Alignment and variant calling. Software maps the short reads back to the human reference genome (GRCh38), figures out where each read came from, and identifies every position where your sequence differs from the reference. Those differences are your variants.
5. Interpretation. Clinical variants get classified against the ACMG guidelines and matched against 200+ pre-built report modules covering conditions like BRCA1/2, hemochromatosis (HFE), pharmacogenomics (CYP2D6, CYP2C19), cardiac risk genes, and dozens of others.

Total lab time is typically 8–10 weeks from sample arrival. Delays are common — this is Dante's weakest area.

Step 4

Reports arrive in Genome Manager.

You get an email when your reports are ready. Everything lives in Dante's Genome Manager portal: reports organised by clinical area (cardiology, oncology, pharmacogenomics, rare disease, wellness), variant details, PDF exports you can hand to a doctor, and the raw file downloads.

The reports update as science advances — a variant that was uncertain in 2026 might get reclassified as pathogenic or benign as new research is published. You get those updates for life, without paying to re-sequence, because the raw data never changes; only the interpretation does.

How long does the whole thing take?

Honest answer: budget three months from order to results. Dante's marketing says 8–10 weeks; user reports on Reddit and Trustpilot cluster around 10–14 weeks and occasionally longer. The wait is not the reason to buy a competitor — every consumer WGS provider is slow, because the sequencing step alone takes days and the interpretation pipeline runs in batches. It's just the reason to order now rather than the week you actually want the results.