Customized vitamins a fix for genetic flaws?

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

UC Berkeley scientists are exploring whether high-speed gene-reading machines - like those used to decode the human genome - will be able to find subtle genetic flaws that can harm health and can be cured by treatments as simple as vitamins.

Eventually, they hope, these scans will help nutritionists customize a course of vitamins to match the strengths and weaknesses of every individual. "Think of it as a metabolic tuneup," said Berkeley researcher Nicholas Marini.

Marini and a team of researchers reported this week that they had found, in DNA samples from over 500 people, four types of genetic mutations that were treatable with folate, a well-known member of the vitamin B family. One of the four had already been identified as a relatively common genetic defect that responded to the vitamin. The three others were new.