A single human genome, printed in font size 4, bound into 130 books comprising 78,000 pages!
Hey Explorer,
A famous film director once said - "I took a speed reading course where you run your finger down the middle of the page and was able to read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It's about Russia."
Taking a DNA test from 23andMe or AncestryDNA is like skimming through Tolstoi’s 'War and Peace' only to learn that it’s about Russia! Quite a disappointing result.
It will take some time, but it’s certainly possible (and worthwhile!) to read 'War and Peace' from the beginning to the end. But what about the human genome that consists of over 6 billion letters?
The answer is surprisingly simple. Imagine if you could read every sentence in 'War and Peace' at the same time and then just stitch all the sentences together in your head. It would take just a few seconds to read the entire novel!
Of course, we cannot read books this way, but scientists have developed technology to read DNA in such a highly parallel manner. That’s exactly how Whole Genome Sequencing works. Millions of short stretches of DNA are decoded at the same time and then computationally stitched together.
It’s about time someone gets a Nobel Prize for that! Hopefully, it will be Nebula Genomics co-founder Prof. George Church ;)
