3rd Chromosome Deciphered

veeoh writes: "Another chapter in the human book of life has been published. Scientists working as part of the Human Genome Project(including some from the Wellcome Trust) have deciphered the complete genetic instructions of a third chromosome, one of the 24 bundles of DNA that carry our genetic material. The BBC has an article about the discovery"

Comments

Poor practice

[SumDeusExMachina]

I'm appalled that our government would waste so much money on something that could easily be done in the private sector. In fact, the last time I heard, they were actively competing with a private sector team in order to see who would first decode the human genome.

Come on, the only thing worse than being patented by a private corporation is being patented by your government. Either way, they'll own the rights to our genetic patterns, but in one instance I'll end up with a tax cut that gives me enough money to move to a country that ignores patent laws, while in the other my government throws away my money competing competing with the private sector. The government should never be competing with the private sector.

For those interested in the ethical/moral issues..

[nikoftime]

Though most of the issues are readily apparent and most people are at least partially familiar with them, there are some that I foun to be quite interesting (especially the commercialization aspect of genetic code):

Ethical, legal, and social issues

Re:Comparison to mice chromosomes?

[bn557]

The problem with this type of comparison is that, for all we know, these genes could just say "make hair like this". 2 different animals could have COMPLETELY different bodies and one, or even many, identical chromosomes because it could only describe what it takes for the body to make hair, or bone, or anything common between the animals.

Since most(all I believe, but I'll stick with most in case I'm wrong) mammals fall under the mammalia Family, there can be many upon many similarities between the genetic makeups of the animals and still have little if none of it be relevant.

(standard disclaimer: I'm a physicist and if anything I said is blatantly wrong, oh well. Mod me down)

Pat

Re:24?

[Byteme]

Then there is Down, Turner's and Klinefelter's syndromes. Down has an extra 21. Turner's is a monosomy X with sexually underdeveloped females. Klinefelter's syndrome are males with extra X chromos, XXY - XXXY. There is also XXX, XXXX and XXXXX female karyotypes with mild effects as the extra X's are inactivated and converted into Barr bodies.

Huh?

[zook]

I don't disagree with your competition point, but your reason seems a bit strange.

Cancer drugs, and drugs in general, will still go through many rounds of testing to measure their safety and efficacy. If a drug makes it through the testing and proves its worth, how much do we care if it was developed from faulty data? In this case the ends really do justify the means. Hell, I can randomly stick atoms together, and if I come up with something that cures cancer, I'd call that a success.

Now, if I were a, say, cancer researcher, I'd want the most accurate sequence I could get, since it might make finding a useful drug much faster and easier. As a consumer, I want the researchers to have accurate sequences for just that reason, but I'm not too concerned about trusting what they come up with if it's not.

Re:Comparison to mice chromosomes?

[barawn]

No problem. Actually, the main difficulty understanding genetics is to get over the problem in my previous post - DNA is not like computer instructions - all DNA does is code for protein, and then the protein interacts in the body and 'does what it is supposed to do' (hopefully). The belief that genetic engineering can end all disease, make perfect humans, etc. is a common mistake, and definitely not true - many human diseases are completely agenetic (take cancer, for instance - everyone would probably eventually develop cancer, given enough time) and more importantly, many of the mechanisms in place in living systems are simply to fix or deal with things that break (again, cancer). To make humans immune to cancer, for instance, you'd have to make a better system than nature designed - good luck. You could, however, cure it, and that's the real benefit of genetic engineering, is that it may help us cure and treat diseases better.

The other point is that I do want to stress that the mouse/human comparison is not quite as useless as a first glance might make it seem. The fact is, if we know how a protein (and therefore a gene) behaves in a mouse, and we alter that gene, and see how that protein behaves, we've got a good guess that it will cause the same behavior in humans. It's not -guaranteed-, but it's better than doing the experiment blindly on humans (animal rights activists aside: from a purely practical standpoint, mice breed faster than humans and have a shorter lifespan, so from a completely amoral standpoint, it's better to do it on mice. It's also harder to control the environment). Wow I could still get flamed for that comment.

Re:=(

[Nakoruru]

DNA is apparently Douglas N. Adam's initials. But what that has to do with the story is anyone's guess.

Re:What does this say about us?

[Timodious]

Diabetes, now reaching epidemic proportions in adults and children, is nearly always caused by a poor diet.

You are severely misinformed. Juvenile-onset diabetes is never caused by a poor diet... it is caused by a genetic disorder affecting the pancreas. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to blame my friend's internal organs dying within the first ten years of life on diet...

Do not compare Eczema (an annoyance) with Juvenile-onset Diabetes. You just show your ignorance. Please check this link for more information about type 1 (Juvenile-onset) diabetes.

Re:Comparison to mice chromosomes?

[Otter]

I wonder how similar 3rd chromosome of mice is to the 3rd chromosome of the human genome. Any research being done in this field?

Imagine if you took the 23 human chromosomes, broke them up into a couple of hundred chunks (I forget the exact number) and randomly reassembled them to make the 20 mouse chromosomes. That's what it looks like. So rodent and human chromosomes don't directly map to one another (that site aside) but there are large chunks containing many genes that can be directly compared.

With the mouse genome being sequenced now, that's one of the big things going on -- regions that are similar between the mouse and human sequences are presumably imnportant enough to be conserved over hundreds of millions of years, and therefore give a clue to the location of important features like genes and regulatory elements. That's one of the major pushes in genomics right now.

Re:Comparison to mice chromosomes?

[afidel]

There is of course a third usage of the DNA, which is junk DNA, but (as far as we know) this has no purpose at all.

Actually one use is very well known, it is to limit the environmental damage done to the actively coded regions of the chromosome. If every chemical or radiation source that hits the chromosome was hiting actively coded regions then mutation rates and cancer et all would be so prevelant that life would be unstable.