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Mahesh

28/02/24 13:13 PM IST

‘10,000 genome’ project completed

In News
  • The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) officially announced the completion of the ‘10,000 genome’ project — an attempt to create a reference database of whole-genome sequences out of India.
About the project
  • About 20 institutions across India are involved in the project with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad being the lead institutions coordinating the project.
  • The Indian population of 1.3 billion consists of over 4,600 population groups, and many of them are endogamous.
  • These factors have contributed to the genetic diversity of the current population.
  • Thus, the Indian population harbours distinct variations and often many disease-causing mutations are amplified within some of these groups.
  • The main outcomes of such an enterprise would be to gain deeper insight into India’s population diversity, improve diagnostic methods and medical counselling, find genetic predispositions to disease, develop personalised and customisable drugs, improve gene therapy and throw more light on individual susceptibility to infectious disease.
  • All the data are being stored at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC) set up by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India at the Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad.
Significance
  • Creating a database of Indian genomes means that researchers anywhere can learn about genetic variants that are unique to India’s population groups and use that to customise drugs and therapies.
  • The United Kingdom, China, and the United States are among the countries that have programmes to sequence at least 1,00,000 of their genomes
  • It will also boost India’s biotechnology sector to expand and have more valuable companies and start-ups.
Genome sequencing
  • A genome is a complete set of genetic instructions which are present in an organism in its DNA.
  • Sequencing is the sequence of occurrences of the four nucleotide bases i.e., adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T).
  • The human genome is made up of over 3 billion of these genetic letters.
  • The whole genome can’t be sequenced all at once because available methods of DNA sequencing can only handle short stretches of DNA at a time.
  • While human genomes are made of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid), a virus genome can be made of either DNA or RNA (Ribonucleic acid).
  • Coronavirus is made of RNA. Every organism has a unique genome sequence.
  • Genome sequencing is a technique that reads and interprets genetic information found within DNA or RNA.
Source- The Hindu

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