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Human Genome Project
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Human Genome Project (HGP) is an international cooperative effort, which began in October, 1990, to sequence the entire human genome of 3 billion base pairs DNA. The primary database locations where these sequences are organized and archived are the GenBank at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, and the EMBL Sequence Database at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. These databanks regularly exchange newly discovered sequences and make them accessible to the public all over the world via the Internet.
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The completion of the Human Genome Project in April 2003 was a major achievement, but the sequencing of the genome marked just the first step toward the goal of using such information to diagnose, treat and prevent disease. Having the human genome sequence is similar to having all the pages of an instruction manual needed to make the human body. Researchers still must learn how to read the manual's language so they can identify every part and understand how the parts work together to contribute to health and disease.
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In contrast to the methodical, piecemeal approach of the Human Genome Project, Venter devised the "whole-genome shotgun strategy," which involves randomly breaking DNA into segments of various sizes and cloning the fragments into vectors (Marshall and Pennisi, 1998; Smaglik, 1998). Since the fragments are randomly cleaved from the genome, they tend to overlap, and a genome assembly program is used to fit contiguous pieces by matching overlapping ends (Wade, 1999). At a certain point... the assembly program cannot unambiguously match new ends, because the human genome contains numerous regions of repetitive DNA. As a result, it is difficult to determine how many repeated units reside within gaps between neighboring contiguous pieces. To bridge the gaps, Celera generates pieces of very large DNA fragments of known length with sequenced ends (Wade, 1999). The assembly program positions neighboring contiguous pieces by looking for a bridging link that has one end matching a DNA sequence in one contiguous fragment and the other end matching DNA in the other (Wade, 1999).
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[One] popularization of the Human Genome Project, this one has the distinction of being the first published as an anthology, and among its contributors are some leading scholars, scientists, and social critics. The three parts of the book present essays covering topics in "History, Politics, and Genetics," "Genetics, Technology, and Medicine," and "Ethics, Law, and Society." Some of the essays are quite provocative, especially editor Kevles's "Out of Eugenics: The Historical Politics of the Human Genome," Dorothy Nelkin's "The Social Power of Genetic Information," Ruth Schwartz Conan's "Genetic Technology and Reproductive Choice," and James D. Watson's "A Personal View of the Project." Still, there is a good deal of substantive overlap among the essays and, while the discussions by experts are more sophisticated and specialized than those appearing in other books, little new information is presented for general readers. Public libraries with either Jerry Bishop and Michael Waldholz's Genome ( LJ 7/90) or Robert Shapiro's The Human Blueprint ( LJ 9/1/91) do not need this title, but academic libraries should consider it.
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In 1988 the Human Genome Project (HGP) was initiated by founding the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) in the USA. The aim of this international organisation is to decipher the whole human genome. The results of this project are supposed to further the understanding of genetic diseases and shall render possible new ways of their diagnosis and therapy. Opponents of this project... fear that it will have negative consequences for future human biological and social life.
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The ultimate goal of the Human Genome Project is to identify and understand the function of all of the genes contained within the human genome. This information will be a boon to biomedical researchers, helping them to identify genes related to specific diseases, to understand how genetic variations affect susceptibility to diseases and responses to drugs, and to design new drugs. Of the human diseases known to be linked to specific genes, 95 percent are associated with genes that have already been located in the working draft of the genome.
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Human Genome Project