Genome Coding- covered by your policy
Summary
Coding the human genome seems like something out of science fiction. But today many scientists are not only doing it, they are in the rat race to be the best!
The current method of cataloging the human genome takes many months and cost approximately $5 million dollars. This method involves isolating strands of double DNA composed of the four bases A, T, G, C and using vibrations and water blasts to break the strand into pieces of 1,000 bases a piece. They then put the strands into a bacterium that duplicates the DNA giving the scientists many duplicates to work with. They then spilt them into single strand and mix them with DNA polymerase and a supply of A, T, G, and C. polymerase crawls up the strands, adding bases one at a time. In the base supply there are radioactively infused bases. Finding theses particular bases helps code the DNA.
But scientists are developing new methods. One of these methods is based on the fact that when DNA duplicates from a single strand to a double coil they give off ATP produced from pyrophosphate. By mixing ready-to-duplicate DNA with a substance that glows when charged with ATP, they can see what bases go where. They mix a chemical that picks up a certain bases; if the solution doesn’t glow they rinse out and try another bases detector. Computers monitor the additions.
They are even trying to develop a way to make different bases show up as different colors in the same solution that way a computer simply picks up on color coding.
The last method described in this article is based on nanopores made by bacteria. By using membranes with actual bacteria and nanopores, they thread a strand of DNA through it and, by putting stoppers on the end, pull it back and forth to read the code. They are also developing a way to us synthetic nanopores and even using DNA polymerase to duplicate it, pulling it at a controlled rate through the pore.
With all these methods constantly being refined and improved, you think that it was spurring enough for the scientific community. But the XPrize Foundation has added to the incentive: $10 million dollars to the first team that can code 100 human genomes in 10 days at a price of $10,000 dollars or less per genome. It is the foundations hope that a typical medical portfolio will soon include your genetic map. So the race is on to find the best way to code the human genome, the next hurtle: figuring out why it matters. We may be able to code the DNA but we have no way of knowing how to treat people according to their DNA, or anything else.
Response
I think this article is really interesting because of all the different ways they can read the “human book”. I honestly didn’t even know that you could begin to read the human DNA. It will be interesting to see whether or not anyone can accomplish the goal of the XPrize foundation. After that, I can’t wait to see what kind of things science can accomplish once we learn to work around DNA. Also reading this article just made me think about the glory of GOD. Four simple bases in repeated 3 billion times, each pattern unique to each of the 6 billion people living on Earth now, and uniquely different from anyone that ever was.
https://createpdf.adobe.com/cgi-pickup.pl/GENE.pdf?BP=IE&LOC=en_US&CUS=be6bcb741c2c37f91e785866224c4428&CDS=4711124E-0E29-0801F8
posted by Ashley @ 12:12 PM
3 Comments:
I think it is intresting that we are learning so much about DNA so quickly. I think it would be very intresting if we could learn to treat each person based on their own DNA. That way we could learn what was more efective for each individual person.
Acutally published by Adam under Ashley's name because mine won't work.
I do think that it is intresting to know that we can read the "human book", but i think that having a race to find the quickest result and using that much money is not that benificial. In the long run you can look at the "human book" to find common diseases taht are carried through DNA. But as for us as humans cloning DNA we shouldn't, God should be in charge.
I think this is very interesting that they have made this much progress from the last time I read about human genomes. I think that in the future this will be helpful to treat people and confront possible hereditary diseases. I think that trying to clone people from this is very wrong and would cause much political controversy.
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