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.

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.