Northwestern professors are saying the completion of a map ofthe human genetic code will usher in a new era for medicine and thebiological sciences
The international association of scientists who worked to decodethe human genome said Monday that the data — which now has 99.99percent accuracy — will be made available for use on databases allover the world.
“For the scientific community, this is a tremendous breakthroughin terms of our understanding of how people function,” saidchemistry Prof. Hilary Godwin. “It holds a promise to revolutionizethe way that people conduct science and understand human diseaseand human physiology. It already has changed the way people doscience.”
The Human Genome Project might enable scientists to tailortreatments for different diseases to an individual’s geneticmakeup, Godwin said.
“If you have cancer,” she said as an example, “we might actuallybe able to tailor the type of chemotherapy we give you so that itis something that would be most effective for you as an individual,with the least amount of toxic side effects.”
Although no NU professors were directly involved with the HumanGenome Project, several faculty members and students are involvedin the field of genomics, which studies how genes function in bothnormal and disease environments. Such studies have been madepossible only because of the genome sequencing efforts, Godwinsaid.
The mission of the Human Genome Project was to map out all thepossible combinations of the four chemical bases that make upDNA.Depending on how the base pairs in DNA are arranged, differenttypes of proteins will be produced, said chemistry Prof. JosephHupp.
Now that scientists have identified all 35,000 genes in humanDNA, Hupp said the next goal is to understand the functions of allthe genes in an effort to identify the ones that cause disease.
“We know all the proteins that can be made, but we have no ideawhat they do,” he said. “The thing that will be important for thenext 25 years is finding out where all genetic-based defects comefrom.”
Understanding how proteins function is important, Hupp said,because “everything that our bodies do that is interesting andcomplicated is done by proteins.”
With this discovery scientists now can focus their study on howdifferent proteins produce certain genetic traits.
“A lot of investigators at NU will be able to use this newinformation as a basis for the kinds of studies they are doing,”said cell and molecular biology Prof. Rex Chisholm, who is directorof NU’s Center for Genetic Medicine. “Many (scientists) need toknow what the sequence of the gene they work on is, and this willprovide them with the opportunity to not have to sequence itthemselves, but just look it up on the database.”
Now that all of the human genes are known, they could be usedfor comparison with other organisms that are easier to study, saidbiochemistry Prof. Neil Welker.
“Many of the genes found in humans are also found in yeast andmice,” Welker said. “It’s not easy to do research with humans, soif you have the same or similar genes, you can do a lot of work interms of mice without resorting to having to do long-termstudies.”
