81–90 of 232 posts
Could someone explain exactly what it means to be "completely sequence" the human genome when all humans have distinct genetic makeup (ie, different sequences of nucleobases in their DNA/RNA)?
The T2T team published a preprint [1] last December and released the data [2] in March. However, due to the peer review process, the findings have only just been formally published in Nature. The publication timeline can indeed be slow, and in cases like this one, the question is: what's the point when all scientists interested in the topic already know about it and working with this assembly?
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.01.518724v1.... [2] https://github.com/marbl/CHM13
Could someone explain exactly what it means to be "completely sequence" the human genome when all humans have distinct genetic makeup (ie, different sequences of nucleobases in their DNA/RNA)?
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I'm curious if these 750MB + the DNA of mitochondria + the protein metagenomics contain all the information needed to build a human, or if there's extra info stored in the machinery of the first cell. That is if we transfer the DNA to an advanced alien civilization - would they be able to make a human.
This is a complex question. The cocktail soup in a gamete (sperm or egg) and the resulting zygote contains an awful lot of stuff that would be extremely hard to replace. I could imagine that if the receiving civilization was sufficiently advanced and had a model of what those cells contained (beyond the genomic information) they could build some sort of artificial cell that could bootstrap the genome to the point of…
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I've never understood this either. I assume the genome is many megabytes of [ATCG]+. If we have that sequence, what does it tell us? Do we look at it and say "Ah, yes, ...ATGCTACGACTACGACTAGCG... very interesting?"
Many genes are highly conserved or consistent enough. E.g.: if there's a 1% difference between two people, then it's a bit like two very unique sentences that have a couple of small typos. They're sill recognisable, and it's also still pretty obvious that they're the "same". A gene sequence allows researchers to determine the amino acids that are coded for, and from those, which proteins match which genes. This can b…
Is this why it’s so hard? This feels more like a healthcare records keeping people and less like an “actually reading the data problem”.
I can’t help but feel like some form of single payer healthcare is truly the way out of this problem. One where all disease record keeping is uniform and complete.
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Yes, and if you gzip it it's even smaller. But the big takeaway is that the amount of info that fully defines a human, is what we consider "not much data," even in its plainest encoding.
We don't know that it fully defines a human until we can create one without the starting condition of being inside another human. It's prototype-based inheritance.
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This is a complex question. The cocktail soup in a gamete (sperm or egg) and the resulting zygote contains an awful lot of stuff that would be extremely hard to replace. I could imagine that if the receiving civilization was sufficiently advanced and had a model of what those cells contained (beyond the genomic information) they could build some sort of artificial cell that could bootstrap the genome to the point of…
What do you mean by "LR"? I queried an LLM but no results there either.
This is actually kind of a huge deal since it means that all 24 chromosomes have now been fully sequenced. As it says in the abstract, up until now the Y chromosome proved difficult to sequence due to its nature.
I thought the human genome project finished in 2003, but now that I look it up again, apparently "finished" meant 92%. And then it was finished in 2022. And now it's finished again. Are there any remaining milestones left toward maybe finishing it again? Was the Y chromosome really just considered an exception until now?
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What if it is apparent that there are other groups pushing the narrative that the media is untrustworthy so that they themselves can own the narrative? Any given group of humans will have a mixture of deceptive and trustworthy participants. Singling one group out for constant castigation, held against an impossible standard, makes it easier for dishonest members of other groups to avoid the spotlight.
"The media" isn't a uniform entity, but when people refer to it in this context they typically mean the large consolidated media corporations that own major print and television outlets. And those entities have essentially eroded their own credibility to the point that trusting anything they say is foolish. If they say the sky is blue, go out and check. They could do better, but until they do , it makes sense to cast…
While media companies have indeed "eroded their own credibility", in that there's a steady stream of falseness alongside truth, I would add with equal measure that "their credibility has been undermined by others". The loudest voices that castigate the media, in America at least, tend to be the ones that profit the most from being the sole arbiter of truth for their own audiences.
The business model of having an autonomous news room that holds itself to factual standards and is largely sequestered from advertising is shrinking and shrinking. I mourn its death, for I see no replacement coming along.