The human genome project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identify, mapping all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint.
Human Genome project
Start date :- 1990
Completed :- April 2003
- HGP was called a mega project. The total cost of project would be approx – 9 billion US dollars.
- HGP was closely associated with the rapid development of a new area in biology called Bioinformatics.
Methodologies of HGP :-
- The methods involved two major approaches. One approach focused on identifying all the genes that are expressed as RNA. The other took the blind approach of simply sequencing the whole set of genome that contained all the coding sequence.
- For sequencing, the total DNA from the cell is isolated and converted into random fragments of relatively smaller sizes and cloned in suitable host using specialized vectors.
Features of HGP :-
- The human genome contain approx 3164 million nucleotide bases.
- The average gene consists of 3000 bases but sizes greatly with the largest known human gene being dystrophin at approx 2 million bases.
- The total number of genes is estimated at 30,000 much lower than previous estimates of 80,000 to 1,40, 000 genes.
- The functions are unknown for over 50% of the discovered genes.
- Less than 2% of the genome codes for proteins
- Repeated sequences make up very large portion of the human genome.
