Genome Project initiation

The complete set of genes that contain all the hereditary information of a particular species is called a genome. The Human Genome Project, initiated in 1990, has identified all the genes that occur in humans and also the sequence of bases in these genes. 

The Physiome Project will undoubtedly benefit from lessons learned during the progress of the Genome Project, in particular, that big visions and small steps (at least initially) are not necessarily a contradiction. It will, however, have to develop a completely different approach to problem solving than that used for the Genome Project, as neither the total dimension of the task (there are only 23 human chromosome pairs) nor the size of the smallest component that needs investigating (DNA bases) can be defined at the outset of the Physiome Project. 

The Human Genome Project went three-dimensional in late 2000. Structural genomics efforts will determine the structures of thousands of new proteins over the next decade. These initiatives seek to streamline and automate every experimental and computational aspect of the structural determination pipeline, with most of the steps involved covered in previous chapters of this volume. At the end of the pipeline, an atomic model is built and iteratively refined to best fit the observed data. The final atomic model, after careful analysis, is deposited in the Protein Data Bank, or PDB (Berman et ah, 2000). About 25,000 unique protein sequences are currently in the PDB. High-throughput and conventional methods will dramatically increase this number and it is crucial that these new structures be of the highest quality (Chandonia and Brenner, 2006). 

Plant genome projects, notably the rice genome project, have also attracted large companies, like Monsanto, Novartis, and DuPont. Arabidopsis thaliana, a brassicacean plant that has become a model in plant genetics, was the first flowering plant to have the genome sequence completed Arabidopsis Initiative 2000). 

The competition among the private and the public initiatives accelerated the human genome project dramatically. Already in June 2000,5 years ahead of the public prospect and even 1 year in advance of his own proposal, Craig Venter announced the completion of the human genome sequence. One of the most important milestones of genetic research had been achieved. 

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