What does mapping an organism’s genome mean, and how is it useful?
In: Biology
The genome is all the genetic information encoded in DNA (or RNA in certain viruses) in the cells of an organism. In animals, this genetic information (encoded in DNA) is organised into chromosomes.
Mapping the genome of any organism is simply ‘reading’ and documenting every single ‘letter’, or base (or to be precise, nucleotide), in the organism’s genome.
This is useful as it can tell us exactly how the organism functions at a molecular level – e.g. how its immune system functions, how its metabolism functions, how development from embryo to adult (in animals) is regulated, how its reproductive system functions etc etc.
It is useful if the organism is valuable to us – e.g. humans, livestock – as it can help us to understand the mechanisms of diseases that we wish to treat and prevent.
It is also useful in disease causing organisms as it can help us to understand in more detail the mechanisms by which the pathogen survives, infects cells and reproduces. We can then use this information to guide the design of new treatments and vaccines.
If you have any questions or if anything is still not clear , let me know and I’ll try and explain!
Ok.
If DNA is the strands of information that your body builds itself on, your Genome would be your body’s full set. Like if you take all the DNA code in your body, that’s the Genome of you basically.
Mapping it out means like individually detailing every single set of instructions for every cell in your body and how it interacts with the other cells in your body or outside it even.
It’s useful in many ways. Like understanding where people come from and all the ways that we’re all a lot more closely related than you might expect.
More importantly understanding the genetic sequence of an organism will tell you a ton of medical information. What diseases might affect you and how. What medicine will do to you and if your body will accept or reject it.
So many more ways too.
The hardest part after the map is drawn is figuring out what it all means… there are on average 20,000-25,000 gene sets in the human body according to something that I honestly skimmed over… don’t quote me or nothing…
Hopefully this will help you know what to look up at least.
Almost every cell in an organism contains a bunch of the same DNA. DNA molecules are looooong chains of 4 different molecules called nucletides, named ‘A’ (adenosine), ‘T’ (thymine), ‘C’ (cytosine) and ‘G’ (guanine). The order of these small molecules in DNA is a code. This code is essentially a recipe for the organism to live and grow.
When you sequence an organism’s genome, what you are doing is getting those DNA molecules out of a cell, running them through a machine which essentially says how many A, T, C, and G’s there are, and in what order. To *map* the genome is to find out which parts of the genome actually do stuff, and what that stuff is. The parts that do stuff are mostly genes, which are shortish sequences that code for proteins, which are the building blocks of organisms.
It’s useful, because once we know what parts of the genome do what, we can then compare different organisms in a population for certain genes. We might know that individuals with this gene respond in this certain way to a disease. Genomes can also be used to compare relatedness within and between species. Since the code changes through time, we assume more change=more time since we shared an ancestor.
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