India may develop gene-based medicines specific and affordable to population
India maps human genome
India has joined the elite league of genomic scientists from US, UK, China, Canada and South Korea by successfully decoding and mapping out the human genome.
India’s success in mapping out human genome comes more than 6 years after the Human Genome Project which unlocked the secret of the book of life -human genome- for the first time in 2003.
The international human genome project, comprising scientists from US, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and China, took 13 years and an investment of $3.5 billion to decode human genome.
Indian scientists from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), a lab of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the top science research body of the country have reportedly achieved the fete in less than two and half months time that too at a cost of $30,000.
Apart from US, UK, China, Canada and South Korea and now India, no other country could successfully decode and map out human genome so far.
Indian scientists sequenced the genome of a 52-year-old healthy male. The reseachers came up with 2,000 new variations, sources close to the project said.
The human genome has 3.1 billion base pairs and the team at IGIB generated over 51 Gigabases of data using next generation sequencing technology.
Human genome mapping could help India develop effective drug development specific to certain diseases and conditions prevalent in the country.
Human genome mapping will also be great facilitator in predictive medicine.
Predictive medicine help forecast whether a person has chances of developing a certain disease and whether a certain medicine will have any impact on him or not, thus reducing healthcare cost and make them afforable to the common man.
The sequencing of the first Human Genome in India in conjunction with Indian Genome variation programme opens newer vistas for low cost affordable healthcare and predictive medicine in future for the masses. This also opens up newer possibilities in disease diagnostics, treatment and sustaining low-cost drugs in the market, experts said.
`But now we have bridged the gap of technology and joined the elite club. It will open up new areas of human biology. The life expectancy can also gain from this outcome,’ Samir Brahmchari, director general of CSIR was quoted as saying.
The human genome is the genome of Homo sapiens, which is stored on 23 chromosome pairs. Twenty-two of these are autosomal chromosome pairs, while the remaining pair is sex-determining. The haploid human genome occupies a total of just over 3 billion DNA base pairs. The Human Genome Project (HGP) produced a reference sequence of the euchromatic human genome, which is used worldwide in biomedical sciences.
The human genome contains 23,000 protein-coding genes, which is stored on 23 chromosome pairs.
Chromosomes, which range in size from 50 million to 250 million bases, must first be broken into much shorter pieces. Each short piece is used as a template to generate a set of fragments that differ in length from each other by a single base that will be identified in a later step. The fragments in a set are separated by gel electrophoresis. New fluorescent dyes allow separation of all four fragments in a single lane on the gel.
The final base at the end of each fragment is identified. This process recreates the original sequence of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs for each short piece generated in the first step.
Finished sequences are submitted to major public sequence databases, such as GenBank. Human Genome Project sequence data are thus freely available to anyone around the world.
Understanding the function of genes and other parts of the genome is known as functional genomics.
Comparative genomics is the analysis and comparison of genomes from different species. The purpose is to gain a better understanding of how species have evolved and to determine the function of genes and noncoding regions of the genome.
Genome researchers look at many different features when comparing genomes: sequence similarity, gene location, the length and number of coding regions (called exons) within genes, the amount of noncoding DNA in each genome, and highly conserved regions maintained in organisms as simple as bacteria and as complex as humans.