Humang Genome Project :: Science Genetics Technology Papers

Humang Genome Project The Human Genome Project (HGP) is an internationally collaborative venture to identify and mark all the locations of every gene of the human species. The HGP in the United States was started in 1990 and was expected to be a fifteen year effort to map the human genome. There have been a number of technological advances since 1990 that have accelerated the progress of the project to a completion date sometime during the year 2003. The U.S. HGP is composed of the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) which hopes to discover 50,000 to 100,000 human genes and make them available for further biological study (1). There are a number of other countries that are involved in the project, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom (1). Besides numerous countries involved in the project there is also a number of commercial companies that are involved in sequencing (6). The collaborative 3 billion dollar price tag will be us ed to sequence the possible 3 billion DNA base pairs of human DNA. The possibilities from the information that will be obtained from the project are virtually endless. It will most likely change many biological and medical research techniques and many of the practices used by our medical professionals today. The knowledge that will be obtained will help lead to new ways of diagnosing, treating, and possibly preventing diseases. Through the discovery of the human genome, the possibilities are endless for agriculture, health services, and new energy sources also. The end result of the HGP will be information about the structure, function and organization of DNA, as we know it today. Technical Aspects of HGP There are a number of goals that have been set forth by the HGP that they hope to have finished by their completion date in 2003. One of the first goals of the project is to identify the 50,000 to 100,000 genes that are found in DNA (2,3,4). The second goal of the HGP is to sequence the 3 billion chemical bases that make up human DNA. DNA sequencing is the process of determining the order of the chemical building blocks "bases" that make up the DNA of the human chromosome. This information will then be stored into a large database so that information can be used by other individuals'. The HGP hopes to then be able to develop tools for the analysis of this data.