Last Sunday was the 10th anniversary of the Human Genome Project. According to LiveScience staff writer Tanya Lewis, it was a 13-year International effort that was completed on April 14th, 2003. As a $3 billion project, it was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and the National Institutes of Health. The goal was to determine the sequence of the 3 billion "letters" in a human being's DNA.
In ten years since the completion of the Human Genome Project, scientists have made significant strides to use genomic advances to further enhance medical knowledge. For example, sequencing technology has substantially improved in last few years. The cost of sequencing the first human genome was about a billion dollars. Today, according to the LiveScience report, it costs only around $3,000 to $5000 and takes just few days to complete.
Since simply knowing the sequence is meaningless, scientists have found ways to interpret it by studying genome’s function by sequencing the genomes of 135 other organisms while surveying the global variation among human genomes.
The report highlights an interesting finding that suggests that very little of the human genome (only 1.5 percent) actually encodes proteins, the molecular building blocks that perform most of the critical functions inside cells. To uncover this mystery, more than 400 researchers from 32 labs worldwide created the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Element (ENCODE) consortium. Last year, they published many important findings about how the human genome functions.
The first catalog of human genome variation was the International HapMap Project, which compared the genomes of people from Europe, China, Japan and Africa. Biotech companies have used these findings and its follow-on, the 1000 Genomes Project, to study populations with and without diseases, in the hope of identifying genetic variants associated with disease. “Such genome-wide association studies have resulted in the identification of thousands of variants that can influence a person's likelihood of developing a disease,” said Lewis.
Since the completion of Human Genome Project, researchers have made big strides in using genomic information for diagnosing and treating cancer. However, reports indicate that researchers have still a long way to go in fully understanding the human genome and its use in improving human health.
Edited by
Ashley Caputo
