The Next Big Frontier?
16/03/12 13:43 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Fri, 03/16/2012 - 13:43.
The concept of chemically synthesizing a complete human genome at this time is just plain silly. First of all, less than 3% of it appears to encode any genes for proteins and RNAs as well as transcriptional regulatory elements. It would be much more sensible to re-engineer a genome to get rid of the junk DNA and prove once and for all that it is not essential. For ethical reasons, such an endeavor should probably be undertaken with a mouse or rat genome.
The real outstanding questions now relate to understanding what most of the genes in the human genome actually do. How do their protein and RNA products interact and function in integrated molecular systems? From an even more practical perspective, how does their malfunction lead to disease and what can we do about it?
There is no doubt that the human genome sequencing project has resulted in a rapid and dramatic decline in the costs of sequencing DNA. However, most other types of biochemical analyses have not seen marked reductions in costs over the last decade, save for those that have benefited from miniaturization, for example with microarray technology.
The sequencing of genomes required in parallel the development of elaborate algorithms and huge improvements in the processing power of computers. Perhaps the next big large scale project should be the development of "synthetic intelligence" that can assist in the meta-analysis of complex biological processes to generate testable hypotheses and make sense of the mountain of biochemical data that is rapidly accumulating. IBM's Watson is a step in that direction. Now that would be a "no brainer" that would actually make the pursuit of biomedical research smarter.
Link to the original blog post.
The concept of chemically synthesizing a complete human genome at this time is just plain silly. First of all, less than 3% of it appears to encode any genes for proteins and RNAs as well as transcriptional regulatory elements. It would be much more sensible to re-engineer a genome to get rid of the junk DNA and prove once and for all that it is not essential. For ethical reasons, such an endeavor should probably be undertaken with a mouse or rat genome.
The real outstanding questions now relate to understanding what most of the genes in the human genome actually do. How do their protein and RNA products interact and function in integrated molecular systems? From an even more practical perspective, how does their malfunction lead to disease and what can we do about it?
There is no doubt that the human genome sequencing project has resulted in a rapid and dramatic decline in the costs of sequencing DNA. However, most other types of biochemical analyses have not seen marked reductions in costs over the last decade, save for those that have benefited from miniaturization, for example with microarray technology.
The sequencing of genomes required in parallel the development of elaborate algorithms and huge improvements in the processing power of computers. Perhaps the next big large scale project should be the development of "synthetic intelligence" that can assist in the meta-analysis of complex biological processes to generate testable hypotheses and make sense of the mountain of biochemical data that is rapidly accumulating. IBM's Watson is a step in that direction. Now that would be a "no brainer" that would actually make the pursuit of biomedical research smarter.
Link to the original blog post.