The Human Genome Project - Report Example

The Human Genome Project Introduction The human genome project is the collaborative and an international research project, whose mission was the complete understanding and mapping of the genes present in the human body. It is one of the world’s largest collaborative biological projects. This project was funded as well as proposed by the American government. The planning of this project started in the year 1984 and it got underway in the year 1990 and was later declared complete in 2003. A parallel project similar to the human genome project was also being conducted outside the government by the Celera Corporation that was launched formally in the year 1998. The sequencing sponsored by the government was performed in the research and universities centers present in France, Germany, China, United States and United Kingdom. The genes present in the human body are collectively known as “genome”. It was considered to be the natural conclusion of history of the genetic research. In the year 1911, a researcher named Alfred Sturtevant realized that for the purpose of managing his data he has to he had to map the site of the fruit fly gene, whose location was being tracked for generation in the lab where he was working. The first gene mapping of Sturtevant was similar to the first flight of Wright brothers at the Kitty Hawk. This project was also compared with the Apollo program whose purpose was to bring mortality to the moon. Hereditary material that is present in all the multicellular creatures is the very famous DNA which has the genes in it. The DNA is the constituent of 4 chemical bases that are positioned in different length and ways. The genome of human has been deciphered by the HGP researcher in 3 major ways i.e. drawing map that indicates the locations of some major genes section of almost all the chromosomes present in the human body, determining the sequence of the order of all the bases of the DNA of genome and the production of linkage map that is the complex version of the kind that was originated in the early research of Drosophila by the help of inherited traits that can traced over generations. History The starting of this project was based on the culmination of several years of work that was supported by the American department of energy. The report presented in the year 1987 stated that the main goal of this research project is to develop a complete understanding of the genome of human and building the knowledge that would be essential for the continuous progress of the medicine and health sciences. The proposal that was suggested by Dr. Alvin Trivelpiece was later approved by the William Flynn Martin who was the Deputy Secretary. The chart was used by Dr. Trivelpiece in the year 1986, who was then the director of the energy research being conducted in the department of energy. In the year 1990, two of the funding agencies i.e. NIH and DOE developed a memorandum for the purpose of understanding for the purpose of coordinating plans and setting the clock for the start of project to 1990. At that particular time David Galas was the director of the US department of energy, which was renamed as “the office of biological and environmental research” in the energy office of US department of science and NIH genome program was headed by James Watson. In the year 1933, Galas was succeeded by Aristide Patrinos and James Watson was succeeded by Francis Collin, accepting the role of the overall project head as the director of NIH. An announcement of the working class of genome was made in the year 2000 and then a complete one was made in the year 2003, with a more detailed analysis. The project worth $3 billion was formally founded in the year 1990 by the NIH and the US department of energy that was expected to get complete in the period of 15 years. In addition to America, the genetics in UK, Australia and France was comprised by the international consortium. It was because of the international cooperation and the advancements in the fields of genomics and the major advancements in the computing technology the rough draft of the genome was almost completed in the year 2000 whose announcement was made jointly by the American president Bill Clinton and the British president Tony Blair. The Genome Bioinformatics group was the first one that holds the credit of completing the rough draft at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This group was led by a graduate student named Jim Kent. The ongoing sequencing further led to the announcements of complete genome in April 2003 that was 3 years earlier than it was planned. Another milestone was achieved in May 2006, when the sequence of the last genome got published in the Journal Nature. The HGP was declared complete in April 2003. However the initial rough draft of the human genome was made available in June 2003. The working draft was later completed and then published in April 2003, which was followed by the final sequencing mapping of the human genome. This sequence was reported to be 99 percent accurate. Later in May 2004 a 99.99 percent accurate sequence was published that indicated 92 percent sampling exceeding over 99.99 percent accuracy that is considered to be within the indented goal. HGP continue to occur for the further analyses and papers. Benefits and Application of the project The sequence of the genome is important for many fields of science, starting from the human molecule to the human evolution. The HGP by the help of the sequencing of the genome provides us the understanding of the diseases such as identifying the mutation and oncogenes that may be linked to different forms of cancer, genotyping of the specific virus for the purpose of directing it to the appropriate treatment, designing medication for more accurate predictions of their effects, application in the fields of biofuels, advancements in the fields of applied sciences, bioprocessing, agriculture and livestock, anthropology, bio-archeology, evolution and risk assessment. Another proposed advantage is the commercial development of the genome research that can be related to the DNA based projects that is a multi-dollar industry. The sequence of the genome is stored on the internet and it is available for anyone who is looking for it. The gene sequence present in the data base of the U.S. national center for biotechnology information is known as GenBank. This is placed along with the sequences of proteins and hypothetical genes. Organization such as the genome bioinformatics groups and Ensembl present the annotation and additional information also some powerful tools for the purpose of searching and visualizing. Computer programs were also developed for the purpose of analyzing the data because the data can be difficult to interpret without the help of such programs. The gene sequence of all human being is unique; therefore the data that is presented by HGP does not represent that exact sequence of the genome of every individual. The gene sequence presented by HGP is a combined “reference genome” of only a small number of anonymous donors. The HGP sequence genome is considered to be scaffold for the future work for the purpose of identifying the difference between the individuals. Most of the current efforts exerted for the identification of difference among the genome sequence of individual include the Hapmap and single nucleotide polymorphism. Finding of the Human Genome Project The key findings of the rough draft that was completed in the year 2001 and of final draft complete in 2004 are stated below: There are approximately 20,500 genes present in the human body that is same as mice. The human genome has more segmental duplications than any of the other mammalian genome. These sections may hence indicate the creation of new primate specific genes. When the draft sequence was published in the Journal nature, lesser than 7 percent of the protein families were found to be vertebrate specific (The Human Genome Project). Accomplishments associated with the project The human genome project began in the year 1990 for the mission of identifying and sequencing the 3 billion chemical units present in the human genetic construction set. The project aimed to find the genetic roots of the disease and then develop a treatment for it accordingly. It was considered to be a mega science project because there are about 3.3 billion base pairs present in the human genome. With the sequence present in hand the next step involves the identification of the genetic variants, which increases the risk of diseases such as diabetes and cancer. At that time it was way too expensive to think about sequencing the whole genome of the patients. So therefore the National institute of health came up with this new idea of shortcut which includes just looking at the sites of the genome where the patients have variant DNA. The concept behind this shortcut was that since some of the major diseases are common, so maybe it is the genetic variant that is the cause behind it. The natural selection does keep the genome of human free from variants which contribute in damaging the health of children before they are grown. This proposed theory however failed to explain the variant occurring later in a patient’s life. The genome is broken into much smaller pieces about 150,000 base pairs in length. These pieces are later ligated into several different kinds of vectors that are derived from the chromosomes of the bacteria that have been genetically engineered. The vectors that contain the gene can be easily inserted into the bacteria, where it is then copied by the DNA replication machinery of the bacteria. Each of these pieces is later sequenced as the “shotgun” project and is then assembled. The larger 150,000 base pairs create the chromosomes. This is called the hierarchical shotgun approach, as the genome is breaks into larger chunks that are mapped into the chromosomes before selecting it for sequencing. The funding for the project came from the American government through the NIH (National Institutes of Health in United States) and from Welcome trust that is a charity organization present in United Kingdom. There were numerous other groups from all over the world that funded the program. The funding were responsible for supporting a number of large sequencing centers including the ones that are present in Whitehead Institute, Baylor college of medicine and Washington University (The Genome Resources). Ethical and Legal issues concerning the project There are various legal, ethical and social concerns raised about the fact that how the detailed knowledge gained about the human genome can be used for discriminating people. One of the other concerns of most of the employees was that the health insurance companies or the employers will refuse to provide them the health insurance coverage because of the health concern that can be indicated by their gene. In the year 1996 the health insurance portability and accountability act was passed by the government that protect the individual against the unauthorized release of the health related information to any other entity except the health care institutions (All About The Human Genome Project (HGP)). Conclusion There are various other advances that are produced by the human genome project that were not considered as accomplishment until much later. One of these advancements is the draft of the rat and mouse genome. The medical researchers did not wait much for using the data from the human genome project. At the beginning of the project in the year 1990, less than 100 genomes have been identified. In the year, 2003, when the project concluded the number of genome identified were 1400. The main focus of this project was the DNA sequence of an individual. The next step of this project involved analyzing the genome sequence from different populations. The catalog of the human genetic variation is named the Hapmap. Researchers suggest that Hapmap will play a significant role in the identification of the more gene related diseases in future. Work Cited All About The Human Genome Project (HGP). 2013. 6 May 2014 . The Genome Resources. 2013. 6 May 2014 . The Human Genome Project. 2013. 6 May 2014 . Read More