As surprising as it sounds, we, the mankind, have made it possible to sequence entire genomes, by virtue of the groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technologies. The beggining was modest: biologists at first worked on interpreting relatively small genomes like bacteria and viruses. In 1996, biologists successfully discovered that the DNA sequence of the common bacterium Escherichia Coli, contains 4,639,221 base pairs (Wikipedia s.v. Human Genome Project). Then how many base pairs does the human genome contain? Over 6 billion.
Despite the overwhelming numbers, scientists from all around the world have made rapid progress ever since they embarked on this grand scheme in 1990. The final goal of the human genome project is to completely analyze the human DNA sequence and furthermore shed light on the mysteries of the human body. Along the way, scientists completed the genomes of several other organisms including yeast and the fruit fly. In 2000, which is only ten years after the beginning of the project, the scientists announced that a "working copy of the human genome was essentially complete".
The process by which the scientists confirmed the human genome is very intriguing. The scientists first determined the "markers", a characteristic sequence of bases that appears within the widely seperated regions of DNA, to locate and return to specific locations in the genome. Scientists then shredded the DNA into small pieces and determineed the sequence of bases in each fragment. The fragments are thoroughly analyzed by the computer and put together in accordance with the overlapping "markers" on the chromosomes--like a jigsaw puzzle put together.
Works Cited
-Wikipedia, s.v. Human Genome Project
- Miller, Kenneth & Levine, Joseph. Biology, Prentice Hall, Boston ,MA
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