Dr Michelle Dickinson: We've actually mapped the entire human genome

Huge news in science this week as scientists finally map all of the human genome! The human genome is made up of billions of Etters known as nucleotide bases, that are paired together in different combinations. They provide the genetic instructions for making the human body. This code determines everything about us including eye and hair colour, height through to our health and predisposition for certain illnesses. Knowing the full human genome can therefore open new doors to better understanding humans and the diseases that affect them. It was over 20 years ago that scientists announced they had sequenced the entire human genome. However, they hadn't quite mapped all of it, as 8 per cent of the genome remained unmapped and unexplored due to the limitations of technology at the time. They dismissed these millions of DNA fragments as “junk,” that served no clear function. But now a large team of scientists have filled the blanks and revealed the composition of the final eight percent of the human genome. To do this they had to develop a number of new techniques to map every single base pair of a human genome. Published in the journal Science (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj6987) the researchers believe that the last eight percent play crucial roles in many cellular functions that lie at the heart of conditions in which cell division runs amok, such as cancer and ageing. They also contain immune response genes that help us to adapt and survive infections and plagues and viruses and genes important in terms of predicting drug response. This discovery and the new techniques developed for it open up the doors for the sequencing of an individuals' genome which might one day become a cheap and routine medical test, moving us closer to individualized medicine for all everyone. Dr Michelle Dickinson joined Francesca Rudkin. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.