Per Edit: Golden Dark Feather
According to Xinhua News Agency, an international research team officially released a complete map of the human genome on March 31, filling in the missing parts of previous related studies and helping scientists further unlock the code of human life.
According to the website of the American magazine "Science", the research team called the "Telomere-to-Telomere Alliance" published a paper in the journal "Science" on the same day, announcing the above research results. Eric Green, director of the National Institutes of Human Genome at the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement that the "true and complete" sequencing of the human genome is a remarkable scientific achievement that gives a "first" glimpse of the full picture of humanity's "DNA blueprint."
Image source: CCTV News
Scientists began experimenting more than 30 years ago to map the human genome, sequencing genes for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) on 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human body, and released a map of the human genome in 2003. However, the map only sequences 92 percent of the human genome, leaving 8 percent difficult to sequence because it contains fragments of duplicate DNA. Over the past 10 years, with the improvement of gene sequencing technology, researchers have been able to sequence the last 8% and map the entire human genome.
To complete 8% of the missing human genome map, the researchers sequenced about 200 million base pairs of the basic chemical structure of human chromosomes and genes. The final complete map includes more than 3 billion base pair sequences and nearly 20,000 protein-coding genes. Of these genes, about 2,000 are new to the study. The researchers also found 2 million new genetic variants, 622 of which are found in medicine-related genes.
The researchers say that over the past 20 years or so, science and technology in related fields have made significant advances, helping them to improve the mapping of the human genome. The new research results will help people better understand the evolutionary and biological characteristics of humans, and help advance medical research in the fields of aging, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, heart disease and so on.
Source: Daily Economic News synthesized from Xinhua News Agency, CCTV News
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