Every living thing on Earth is built from instruction manuals-an organism’s genes-found inside it’s cells, just as how a car or a generator set comes with it’s own instruction manual. The complete set of instruction manual is called a genome. For humans, the complete set is 6 billion characters long. We all inherit half of our body’s instruction manual (3 billion characters) from our mother and half from our father. When these strands bond together, the connections create units of information called “base pairs”. Base pairs can take on one of four values, signified by the names of the molecules from which they are made: A, C, G or T. A stands for Adenine, C for Cytosine, G for Guanine and T for Thymine.
Sequencing a person’s genome means discovering the value of all 3 billion DNA base pairs-every A, C, G and T-in your body’s instruction manual. Its the full host of biological blueprints that encodes uniquely who you are.
Benefits of DNA Mapping
- Tracing of ancestral lineage: One can be able to trace his/her ancestral lineage so as to discover their roots and what their ancestors were like, both physically and character wise.
- Individual weakness to diseases: A person can be able to determine which diseases he/she is likely to encounter at a later stage in their life so as to take precautionary measures.
- Susceptibility to various cancers: Cancer is one of the fatal diseases known to man presently, with the determination of the person’s DNA blueprint, the cancer can be avoided.
- Effectiveness and Ineffectiveness of various drugs: An individual can now determine which drugs do work effectively for them and those that don’t, and the reasons for both.
In 2003, only one human genome had been sequenced in the world, and it costs 50 cents per character. Today, just seven years later, the price has dropped to an astonishing 1/300,000 of a dollar per character. Within two to four years, because of rapidly advancing technology and economies of scale, the price is expected to fall by another factor of 10 or more, bringing the total cost of a full genome down to about $2,000.
The era of affordable genomes hasn’t yet arrived, but it isn’t far off and mapping personal genomes at the price point of a laptop computer will change the face of medicine and, in a sense, the world.
