![]() ![]() Yet all these powerful tests are based on the assumption that, inside our body, a genome is a genome is a genome. (Sequencing can be done in as little as 50 hours.) And they’re identifying links between mutations and diseases that have never been seen before. The cost of sequencing an entire genome has fallen so drastically in the past 20 years - now a few thousand dollars, down from an estimated $3 billion for the public-private partnership that sequenced the first human genome - that doctors are beginning to sequence the entire genomes of some patients. Genetic counselors can look at the results of genetic screenings to help patients and their families cope with these diseases - altering their diet, for example, if they lack a gene for a crucial enzyme. They also use sequencing to understand genetic variations that can raise the risk of certain diseases. As the egg divides to form an embryo, it produces new copies of that original genome.įor decades, geneticists have explored how an embryo can use the instructions in a single genome to develop muscles, nerves and the many other parts of the human body. When an egg and sperm combine their DNA, the genome they produce contains all the necessary information for building a new human. It’s also posing challenges for genetic counselors, who can’t assume that the genetic information from one cell can tell them about the DNA throughout a person’s body. Science’s changing view is also raising questions about how forensic scientists should use DNA evidence to identify people. ![]() Scientists are finding links from multiple genomes to certain rare diseases, and now they’re beginning to investigate genetic variations to shed light on more common disorders. “It’s changed the way I think,” he said in an interview. Lupski, a leading expert on the human genome at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in a recent review in the journal Science that the existence of multiple genomes in an individual could have a tremendous impact on the practice of medicine. “Now we’re mapping this new continent.”ĭr. The variation in the genomes found in a single person is too large to be ignored. Urban and others has demonstrated that those whispers were not just hypothetical. “You would have just run against the wall.”īut a series of recent papers by Dr. Even three years ago, suggesting that there was widespread genetic variation in a single body would have been met with skepticism, he said. “There have been whispers in the matrix about this for years, even decades, but only in a very hypothetical sense,” said Alexander Urban, a geneticist at Stanford University. Some have genomes that came from other people. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information - or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, “The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself.”īut scientists are discovering that - to a surprising degree - we contain genetic multitudes. From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity.
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