The Human Genome Project

One of my many “hats” at my university is to teach 1^st year veterinary students about the wonderful world of genetics. The great thing about 1^st year students (or college students in general) is that they tend to get bored. So this year, I was really doing my research, trying to find interesting and fun facts about genomics to hold and keep their attention. I stumbled on some research about the human genome project that I thought ya’ll might be interested in.

In order to determine “mutated” genes or gene alleles that cause cancer or disease or whatever aliments you’re interested in, one needs to know what the “correct” gene looks like. In order to do that properly, every single gene, which is greater than 40,000, of the human genome must be identified (also termed sequenced). The genetic code is a bunch of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs (termed bases), 3.3 billion of them to be exact. So the process of determining and reading 3.3 billion ATCG’s was not only a long process, but also a costly one. The project took 13 years for a team of scientists to complete and cost $3 billion dollars, so about $1 and 0.1 seconds per base. With such a large investment of time and money, it got me thinking about how the information was collected and how useful it was…

In order to read the bases, you need to have someone’s DNA. So, who was the lucky guy or gal that donated their genome for this massive project? I’m not going to get into the ethics of this, but did find out that scientists wanted to keep the identity of the DNA donor anonymous so they got 40 people to donate blood (half males and half females), and randomly selected 2 females and 2 males to use. However, the DNA quality of the 4 samples was very different and the majority of the genome sequence was from a single donor, only to be identified as RP11. Therefore, this “RP11” person’s genes are now known as the “normal” genes used to compare everyone else’s genes to. What is to say this RP11 is “normal” and his/her genes are the “correct” ones?

I think our society has progressed significantly in the last 20 years, but many questions still remain unanswered. There is just so much genetic information in a single person, that we can’t possibly know all the answers. If it took 13 years to read the genome of a single person, think about how long it would take for everyone to get their DNA read. As a scientist, studies like these are very interesting and I hope I was able to hold your interest too. Just a little fun food for thought for a Thursday afternoon!