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The Human Genome Project
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All the information about how a living thing will look and function is stored in long chains of __________.
Look around your classroom, or think of the people you know. Unless you have an identical twin or triplet, there is no one in the world quite like you — your characteristics are unique. And yet, you still look very much like most other people living on the planet. And the similarities between us don’t stop there! The way your body works is more or less the same as everyone else’s.
But what guides those processes and makes our bodies look and work the way they do? Information and the detailed instructions are “written” and stored in our cells in long chains of molecules — our DNA. DNA molecules are made up of four compounds, called bases — adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. These bases pair up, so that DNA molecules end up looking a bit like a twisted ladder. These bases are arranged in a specific sequence — a genetic code.
Some parts of the sequence give instructions to cells, while others don’t. DNA is organised into 23 pairs of chromosomes. DNA and other genetic material in our cells make up a molecular manual for constructing a human. This “manual” is the human genome. It’s 1984 and scientists decide to start a massive biology project involving scientists from many countries.
This is the Human Genome Project. The Human Genome Project officially begins in 1990. The scientists participating hope to find the sequence of DNA base pairs in all human chromosomes. In total that is around three billion base pairs! Scientists want to use this sequence to construct a map of the entire human genome and show the location of nearly every gene.
They want to do this because they hope it will help us understand everything about how bodies work and even help us cure diseases! After thirteen years of hard work the Human Genome Project ends in 2003, two years ahead of schedule. The results reveal many surprising things! Before starting the project, scientists thought they would find around 100 000 genes, but they only found an estimated 20 000 to 25 000 genes. That’s a lot less than they were expecting!
In fact most of our DNA does not actually give instructions to cells — it does not code for genes. So what does that part of DNA do? We’re not really sure about that. Another interesting result of the project is that all humans share almost 99.9% of the human genome. The genetic difference between every person is only 0.1%!
And despite hopes that sequencing the human genome would help us find cures for all diseases, it hasn’t. This made scientists believe that DNA isn’t the only thing that determines how our bodies work. The results of the Human Genome Project are very important to science and medicine today. Techniques developed through the project, combined with the data, helped us discover a lot more about genes: what diseases they might cause and how we might repair damaged genes. One human genome can now be sequenced in more or less a day and the process costs around one thousand dollars.
A big difference to the project which took thirteen years and cost billions! So what happens now after the Human Genome Project has been completed? Will scientists stop researching the human genome? Not at all! While we might have the complete sequence of the human genome, there is still a huge amount of things to discover.
And so exploration goes on!