Scientists Have Finally Decoded The Entire Human Genome
Eichler stated that scientists believed unknown areas contained “junk”. Not him. He said that some of us believed there was gold hidden in the hills. Howard Hughes Medical Institute pays Eichler, who also supports The Associated Press’s science and health department.
He said that gold contains many important genes. These genes are crucial to making a person’s brain larger than a chimp’s.
Scientists needed new methods to understand the cryptic genetic language of life in order to find these genes.
To read genes, you must cut the DNA strands into pieces that are hundreds of thousands of letters in length. Scientists try to place the pieces correctly using sequence machines that read each letter. This is especially difficult in areas with repeated letters.
Scientists claimed that some areas were difficult to read before gene sequencing machines improved their ability to accurately read millions of letters of DNA at once. Scientists can now see repeated genes as long strings, rather than snippets they had to piece together later.
Researchers had to also overcome another problem: Cells often contain DNA from both the mother and father. This makes it difficult to correctly assemble these pieces. Researchers at T2T solved this problem by creating a cell line using one “completely hydatidiform motle”, an abnormally fertilized egg that contains no fetal tissue and has two copies of the father’s DNA, but none of the mother’s.
Next is mapping more genomes, including those that include collections of genes from both parents. The next step is to map more genomes, which can include both parent collections.
The effort failed to map the male chromosome 23 (called the Y chromosome), as the mole contained an X.
Wang stated that he is currently working with the T2T Group on the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium. This consortium is working to generate “reference” or template genomes for 350 people, which represent the breadth and diversity of human life.
Eichler stated, “Now that we have one genome correct, we need to do many, many more.” This is the beginning for something truly amazing in the field of human genetics.
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