Genomics era welcomes Bangladesh to go ahead
GENOMICS is the study of an organism's genome and the use of genes. It deals with the systematic use of genome information, associated with other data, to provide answers to problems in biology, medicine, and industry. Genomics can offer new therapeutic methods for the treatment of some diseases, as well as new diagnostic methods. It also has applications in food and agriculture sectors. The major tools and methods related to genomics are bioinformatics, genetic analysis, measurement of gene expression and determination of gene function.
The term genome represents the total content of genes in an organism. A gene is a unit of heredity in a living organism, and a particular segment of DNA molecule that is coded for a type of protein in the organism. All proteins are specified by genes.
DNA is made up of four similar chemicals -- nucleotide bases -- adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T), which are inserted repeatedly for millions or billions times throughout a genome. Genomes vary widely in size: the smallest known genome, bacterium, contains about 600,000 DNA base pairs, while human and mouse genomes have some 3 billion. The order of insertion or occurring sequence in a DNA molecule is unique for each chromosome in each organism. The particular order of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs is extremely important. The order underlies all of life's diversity, even dictating whether an organism is human or another species such as yeast, rice, or fruit fly, all of which have their own genomes and are themselves the focus of genome projects.
DNA sequencing, the process of determining the exact order of the 3 billion chemical building blocks (called bases and abbreviated A, T, C, and G) that make up the DNA of the 24 different human chromosomes. Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) has long been an important model organism for the eukaryotic cell, which was the first eukaryotic genome that was completely sequenced and released on April 24, 1996.
The flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana is an important model system for identifying genes and determining their functions, and its genome was the first to be sequenced among the flowering plants. The small size of its genome makes Arabidopsis thaliana useful for genetic mapping and sequencing -- with about 157 million base pairs and five chromosomes, and it was the first plant genome to be sequenced completed.
Arabidopsis thaliana has no economic value. Thus, world scholars in plant molecular biology concentrated their efforts on rice (Oryza sativa). The International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP), a consortium of public funded laboratories, was constituted in September 1997 at a workshop held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Plant Molecular Biology in Singapore. It was completed on August 10, 2005.
Researchers of IRGSP published the "finished" DNA blueprint in the journal Nature on August 11. It included the location and sequence of over 37,500 protein-encoding genes in 389 million bases of DNA. Rice is the first crop whose genome has been sequenced. Rice is considered a model system for plant biology largely due to its compact genome (430 million base pairs on its 12 chromosomes) and evolutionary relationships with other large-genome cereals, such as sorghum (750 Mb), maize (2,500 Mb), barley (5,000 Mb) and wheat (15,000 Mb).
The genome project which gave birth to the new genomic era is the Human Genome Project (HGP). Begun in October 1990, HGP was a 13-year, multinational effort undertaken by 20 groups from six countries coordinated by the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. It is the largest single biological project ever undertaken, and the completion of the HGP marks the beginning of a new era, and a major scientific milestone of the 21st century. Genomics is one of the more fundamental advances in human history. The main goals of the project were to identify approximately 30,000 genes in human DNA and to determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs and make them freely accessible for biological research.
Thanks to the leaders of the Green Revolution that contributed much in the 20th century, the number of people in danger of malnutrition worldwide has decreased significantly in the past 30 years. However, an estimated 800 million people still lack adequate access to food. The world now sits at the cusp of a second agricultural revolution, the "Gene Revolution," in which modern biotechnology could enable enhancement of agricultural productivity that could be tailored to meet the needs of the regions that still face food shortages.
A consortium of researchers in Bangladesh, made up of Dhaka University, Bangladesh Jute Research Institute and Software Company DataSoft Systems Bangladesh Ltd. in collaboration with Centre for Chemical Biology, University of Science Malaysia, and University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, has successfully decoded the Jute Plant Draft Genome Sequencing.
On June 16, 2010, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina disclosed in the parliament that Bangladeshi researchers had successfully done draft genome sequencing of jute, which would contribute to improving jute fibre. In 2010, Bangladeshi scientists had succeeded in unveiling the genome sequencing of tossa jute. This year the team successfully decoded the genome sequence of a local variety of jute plant, opening up a new venture in the development of the golden fibre.
Such decoding opened up a new vista in the development of a variety of the biodegradable natural fibre. With the successful sequencing of jute genome, Bangladesh becomes only the second country after Malaysia among the developing nations that could do so.
The writer is Professor and former Director, Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Rajshahi.
Email: bari@ru.ac.bd
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