Sanger successes
22 October 2003
The tenth anniversary of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in October 2003 was followed, a month later, by the announcement that it had reached the landmark of 2 billion bases of sequenced DNA.
The first base (deposited in 1993) was a G from the nematode worm, the two billionth a T from mouse chromosome 2. In between are 903 million bases from the human genome, 630 million from the mouse, 246 million from the zebrafish, and the genomes of more than 25 pathogens.
The latest milestone from the Sanger Institute is the completion of human chromosome 6, published in Nature in October. Chromosome 6, which constitutes about 6 per cent of the human genome, is the seventh of the 24 human chromosomes to be completed (joining chromosomes 7, 14, 20, 21, 22 and Y), and the largest to be fully analysed to date.
The chromosome sequence is more than 166 million base pairs - equivalent to about 50 bacterial genomes - and contains 1557 genes. Fewer than 50 per cent of these genes were known before.
Chromosome 6 is best known as the home to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a group of genes that play a crucial role in defence against infectious organisms, and have been implicated in autoimmune diseases, and in transplant biology, determining our match against potential donors.
About 130 genes mapping to chromosome 6 were known to cause, predispose to or protect from disease. The full chromosome sequence will boost researchers’ efforts to identify other genes on the chromosome proving harder to pin down, genes that have been implicated in diseases such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, cancer and heart disease.
See also
- Largest bite at the human genome (Press release: 22 October 2003)
External links
- Human Chromosome 6 Project Overview at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
- The DNA sequence and analysis of human chromosome 6, Nature 425, 805-811 (23 October 2003)