Last week, I wrote about the potential of personalized medicine, and I briefly mentioned the role of genetic sequencing and the Human Genome Project (HGP) in making personalized medicine possible. This week, I want to delve a little deeper into what exactly goes into sequencing a genome. The HGP, which took 13 years to complete, was performed using a process known as Sanger sequencing. Sanger sequencing, invented in 1977 by Fred Sanger, is a laborious and costly process of sequencing. In the HGP, relatively tiny fragments of the human genome were sequenced multiple times and aligned together, piece by piece,…
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The last few weeks, I have written about the complex molecular immunity mechanism of CRISPR and how we can harness it to precisely edit genes in a gamut of cells. But the ability of CRISPR to treat genetic disorders, predispositions, and susceptibilities relies on our understanding of the genetic basis of disease. Since the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 2003, which sought to sequence the entire human genome, scientists have made great strides in connecting diseases and disorders with their genetic backgrounds. In the meantime, the invention of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in 2006 has drastically reduced…
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