Important reminder that your genome is your property

Your invaluable genome

Genomic data is the currency of a new era of medicine that promises incredible advances. Here, bioinformatician Nana Mensah explains why…

In the race for greatest medical revolution of the 21st century, genomics is undoubtedly a frontrunner. Those outside of the field, however, might still find themselves wondering: 'what's all the fuss about?' There are many reasons why genomics is revolutionary, but data is at the root of it all. As genomics is used more and more in mainstream care, it becomes ever more important to understand the great power and value of this new kind of data, writes Nana Mensah.

From cell to computer

While the word ‘genome’ refers to the entire sequence of DNA of an individual organism, the term ‘genomic data’ refers to its digital representation – a large data file resulting from the sequencing process.

READ MORE …

A boozy view of the human genome project, where it's been and might go

Human Genome Project: new alcohol abuse study could help us finally unlock secrets to beating genetic diseases

“Geneticists tried to exploit the revelations about the genome with studiesthat combed through thousands of tiny genetic changes in hundreds of thousands of patients with different diseases to see how they compared to healthy people. This enabled them to correlate genetic changes in diseased DNA in a manner unimaginable before June 2000. The “genetic architecture” of a wide number of conditions from cancers to schizophrenia to addiction became much better understood as a result.

Yet after the first few thousand studies were published, geneticists were horrified to discover that 98% of the disease-associated changes they’d identified in the genome do not occur in the genes. Instead, the vast majority of changes related to disease occur in the 98% of the genome that is not made up of genes – known as the “junk genome”, since few had the foggiest notion of what it was or how to study it.”

READ MORE …