Genome Project accomplishments

The Physiome Project sets a vision that will be much harder to accomplish than that of the Human Genome Project - formally begun in October... 

The year 2000 marked the completion of the Human Genome Project s primary goal. Through intensive efforts of both private and public agencies, the sequence for the three billion base pairs that encodes the instructions for being human has now been determined.5 As a result of the Human Genome Project, we have determined the complete chemical structure, nucleotide by nucleotide, of the DNA within each of these chromosomes, the chemical structures that encode our lives. It is an extraordinary accomplishment in chemistry. 

The dimensionality of chemical structure space exceeds that of known biological functional space. The dimensionality of biological functional space has increased in recent years due to the discovery of a multitude of genes, largely from the Human Genome Project. This chapter, however, will focus on chemical diversity rather than functional diversity. Quantification of chemical diversity involves two areas first, the predefmition of a chemical space, accomplished by selection of a diversity metric and a compound representation (i.e., molecular descriptors) and second, a rational subset selection, or classification, method dependent on efficient dimensionality reduction. Here, we describe these methods, prerequisites for a definition... 

In June 2000, two teams of scientists (one from a private biotechnology company and one from the publicly funded Human Genome Project) announced that they had completed the first draft of the sequence of the 3.1 billion base pairs in human DNA. This is an enormous accomplishment. For example, if the sequence of 1 million base pairs were determined each day, it would take more than 10 years to complete the sequence of the human genome. 

Mapping of the Human Genome. The Human Genome Project began in 1990, and by the summer of 2000, the entire human genome had been mapped. This feat was accomplished in far less than the expected time as a result of both cooperative and competitive interactions of laboratories in the private as well as the public sector. 

DNA sequencing means a reading of the nucleotide order of a piece of DNA. The main purpose of the Human Genome Project (HGP) was to determine the nucleotide composition of the human genome. This was accomplished with an immense international effort for 3 billion between 1990 and 2003 [30]. It also became apparent how little we knew about the human genome and how valuable it would be if a human genome had been sequenced for a much cheaper price and less time. This initiated a huge competition for inexpensive and quicker methods. This competition... 

In 1994, the first edition of this book was published. Since then there have been several almost revolutionary advances in the technology of x-ray crystallography. Among them are the x-ray source, new instruments and faster computer programs. The accomplishments of the Human Genome Project pushes a vigorous pursuit for the determination of the structures of both nucleic acid and proteins. X-ray crystallography is the number 1 tool, followed by NMR. 

---