Chapter 21 Post

Buenos días! This chapter is all about genomes, proteomes, and bioinformatics! 


First of all, let's review/define exactly what these three things are:

• Genome - "the complete genetic composition of a cell or a species"
• Proteome - "the entire complement of proteins that a cell or organism can make"
• Bioinformatics - "a field of study that uses computers to study biological information"

My first useful material is this article from PubMed titled, "Genomics of bacteria and archaea: the emerging dynamic view of the prokaryotic world." As you can tell from the title, it is all about bacteria and archaea genomics. Did you know the first bacterial genome was sequenced in 1995? Did you know the first archaeal genome was sequenced in 1996? Okay, maybe you did, but I didn't! I was born in '95, meaning it was first sequenced the same year as me! 16 years is a considerably long time, but in scientific terms, 16 years is nothing! These are a perfect example of "recent" advances. The article goes on to describe how analysis of hundreds of genomes has enabled scientists to form generalizations on the principles of genome organization and evolution. It mentions the importance of HGT, which stands for horizontal gene transfer. HGT "is a dominant force of prokaryotic evolution." The abstract also describes the mobilome (yes, another "ome"). The mobilome is the total of all mobile genetic elements in a genome, and includes viruses and plasmids. These are all extremely important to HGT.

My next useful material are these videos below from YouTube. The source is MindBites.com, otherwise known as "the dude in the pink shirt." I have used these videos numerous times, and I think the man always explains things in a simple and easy to interpret way. The first video is all about eukaryotic genomes. Unlike prokaryotes, eukaryotic chromosomes typically have a great amount of short repetitive sequences called repetitive DNA sequences. Repetitive sequences can be divided into two categories, moderately repetitive sequences and highly repetitive sequences. Repetitive DNA composes 59% of the genome of humans. That's a lot! Why do eukaryotes have so many of these? The reason is that much of it is derived from transposable elements.

The video above talks about the Human Genome Project. The Human Genome Project was a research effort to identify and map all human genes. In began in 1990 and was mostly finished by 2003. One of the major findings of the project was that humans only have about 35,000 or so genes while fruit flies have 13,600 and round worms have 19,098 genes. People aren't really that "high up" the animal kingdom as we once thought. 

I found another useful material describing the Human Genome Project. This article talks about the Human Genome Project Results. One of the topics mentioned, which we've described in class, is how human beings only differ from one another about 0.1%. So out of our 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA, only 10 million or so are different. The differences in base pairs are called single nucleotide polymophisms. Much more research is needed in SNPs, but the Human Genome Project has given us a great start.