Human Genome Mapping Completion TBA

rit writes: "According to this CNN article, both The Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics, Inc., two groups who have been working on mapping the human genome, are scheduled to hold news conferences Monday in which they will announce the completion of the Human Genome. This should prove interesting, and makes me wonder: what will we do next?"

Comments

Next up...

[Tebriel]

Mapping that region of space where that 1 sock escapes to from the dryer.

The real work is just beginning...

[orac2]

...and the real battle for IP is just beginning too. The real work will be turning the sequence into useful information. First what and where are the actual genes, then what proteins do the genes code for and what role the protein plays in metabolism or regulating other genes. Some idea of how much work needs to be done can be gathered from the fact that we don't even know how many genes there are - the most recent estimates for the total number of genes range from about 40,000 to 120,000. This process is called "annotating" and will take years. It's also where all the money lies, since this is what'll be patented as part of biotech companies' IP. Plus, even now, there are tensions (as discussed in this weeks Nature, between the people who are producing the sequences and the people who are analyzing and annotating those sequences. On the one hand, some researchers are dedicating their time to sequencing as quickly as possible and so don't get the chance to follow up anything interesting they come across, on the other hand, just how much credit should they get for providing the raw data for someone else work in annotating?

Finally, don't forget this is just a first draft - there's still a lot of donkey work required to map out tricky regions and to verify already covered regions.

Not that big of a deal.

[Xerithane]

Merely mapping (which I don't think that they have, considering we don't even know when we stop mapping the human genome.. it's not like there is a big sign that says, "You have reached the end of the genome, thank you, now go home") doesn't achieve ANYTHING. At all, I wrote DNA analysis software to identify possible "interesting" strands as they went through the processor. The methods used to map DNA, if just stuck in there will contain A LOT of contamination and misreads, hence their so called complete map is one that would be analagous to that drawn of a third grader with a crayon. Granted, they are doing a significant amount of research and should be commended for it, but just mapping doesn't mean anything.
The thing that I really have a problem with is that Celera just dumps all their gene reads into the patent office and gets rewarded the intellectual property for said read. This is complete crap - they did not discover anything that should be worthy of a patent. Maybe we should branch off a new patent office for this type of work. The read should be forced to be open and free to use after 3 years maximum, this will stop someone who figures out the gene for cancer, obesity, intelligence, whatever from forming a monopoly screwing us out of healthy, slender, really smart people.
However, I know a lot of you think that this work would not be done if they didn't patent this work so they could sell it to pharmo's to make money. You are right, they should be able to have limited commercial rights to it. The ability to cure a plague upon humanity should be a non-commercial engagement.
Just my overly long $0.02.

nerdfarm.org

What's the real value of this?

[scheme]

So the HGP and Celera have managed to sequence the geonome of a single person. This doesn't really address the fact that there are variations on genetic sequences even those that code for important proteins. Some of these variations cause problems but others don't. Although HGP is attempting to sequence the geonome's of 4 different people in other to get this variation, this doesn't really capture the distributions across different ethnic groups. Getting that is problem that is even larger than sequencing a few geonomes.

Another problem I see is that even if we are able to sequence the genetic code for all the proteins, what are we going to do with them. Identifying genetic diseases before they occur is all well and good but is it really that valuable if all we can tell people right now is that twenty years down the line you're going to get Hunington's disease or someother incurable ailment and die?

The outlook for coming up with effective genetic therapies is pretty bleak. We haven't really been able to treat even the diseases that are purely genetic and are caused by a well defined mutation. With this sort of track record how are we going to do against diseases that are caused by multiple mutations or where different individuals with the disease have different mutations? And this isn't even considering diseases that are caused by interactions between interactions between the gene and environment/history of the individual or disease caused non-genetic inheritance.

It seems like alot of people see genetics as a panacea for all human ills. However this overlooks the fact that the environment is just as important as genetics. In some respects, the attention that whole gene therapy is getting resembles the hype that surrounded radiation in the early 20th century when radiation was going to cure anything and everything.

I use them every day

[rgmoore]

Knowing the amino acid sequences is a big key to being able to figure out how things work. Some examples:

• You want to know what part of the genome makes us uniquely human rather than, say, a mouse. You will soon be able to compare the whole human genome to the whole mouse genome (which will be out in a couple of years) and see where they're similar and where they're different.
• You want to know what things are really important for making organisms tick at a basic level. You can compare the whole genome of humans, mice, yeast, bacteria, etc. and find what genes in all of them are very similar. If it's close to the same in humans and bacteria, chances are it's really, really important.
• You find a protein that's implicated in some disease or other. You correlate data generated from the unknown protein with the sequences for all human proteins to identify it. There's an excellent chance that you'll be able to figure out what it does by comparing it to known genes in other organisms.
• You don't know what the protein above does. You can do experiments to see which other proteins it associates with (there are several ways of doing this) and that will often give you excellent information about what it does.
• Coming soon You have identified a protein but can't figure out what it does. Using its sequence, you will soon be able to predict its 3-D structure, which can give you clues about what it does.