by Kelli Sokoloff
Every living thing on earth has DNA that dictates its appearance and function by coding specific genes. The DNA in all organisms creates genes and all these genes make up the genome, for example all of our genes are the human genome. This genome dictates everything about the physical and biological makeup of all humans, from their appearance to their immune system.
Scientists are continuously doing research on the human genome to see how humans have evolved over time.The human genome is also compared to other species in order to better understand genetic diversity and evolutionary relationships.
The Human Genome Project was an international collaborative effort, in which scientists from all the world came together in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and China to complete the sequencing and mapping of the human genome. Sequencing is writing the order of all the base pairs in DNA while mapping its noteing it’s location on the genome. A major discovery they made is that humans have approximately 20,500 different genes. Researchers also compared the human genome to the genomes of other organisms to discover similarities and differences such as the human relation to apes. The HGP was completed in 2003 and was revolutionary to scientists because they now have better insight into how and why humans have the characteristics that they do.
The relevance of the HGP endless possibilities. In the words of Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the time of the HGP, “It's a history book - a narrative of the journey of our species through time. It's a shop manual, with an incredibly detailed blueprint for building every human cell. And it's a transformative textbook of medicine, with insights that will give health care providers immense new powers to treat, prevent and cure disease.". One major breakthrough caused by the HGP is making scientific data readily available online, which caused the discovery of the cystic fibrosis gene. The HGP also discovered that most of the human DNA does not code for genes and is “junk”, disproving the old belief that humans had 100, 000 genes. Now, the researchers and scientists need to read the entire genome they wrote and connect this to how the body functions and works. This discovery explains the health and pathology of human diseases how humans have evolved over time on a cellular level. As all these fields continue to develop the human genome project will be the reason for many of these discoveries.
References
“Human Genome.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/science/human-genome. Accessed 29 May 2019.
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