The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-01)

FRIDAY, APRIL 1 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

NEW YORK

Judge strikes down

congressional maps

A New York judge on Thursday
struck down the state’s new
congressional and legislative
maps as defying a voter-backed
constitutional amendment that
aimed to end partisan
gerrymandering, dealing a blow
to Democrats hoping to hold on to
their fragile majority in the House
this November.
State Supreme Court Judge
Patrick McAllister in Steuben
County ordered the state
legislature to draw bipartisan
maps by April 11 or the court will
appoint an independent map
drawer to do it. The state will

appeal the decision, triggering an

automatic stay until the state

appeals court takes it up.

New York Democrats drew a

new congressional map with

boundaries that could gain their

party as many as three new seats,

a crucial advantage at a time

when the House majority could

come down to just a handful of

wins.

The state congressional map

ruled unconstitutional by the

state judge would give Democrats

22 seats to four Republican ones.

The New York delegation is

composed of 19 Democratic seats

to eight seats for Republicans.

The state lost a seat because of

slow growth over the past 10

years.

— Colby Itkowitz

WEATHER

Severe storms leave

two dead in Florida

A line of severe storms packing

isolated tornadoes and high

winds ripped across the Deep

South overnight — killing at least

two in the Florida Panhandle,

toppling trees and power lines

and leaving homes and

businesses damaged as the vast

weather front raced across

several states.

In Florida, the Washington

County Sheriff’s Office said

Thursday morning that two

people were killed and two people

injured when a tornado touched

down in the western panhandle.

At least two confirmed

tornadoes injured several people

Wednesday, damaged homes and

businesses, and downed power

lines in Mississippi and

Tennessee after an earlier storm

caused damage in Arkansas,

Missouri and Texas.

— Associated Press

EDUCATION

Student workers at

Dartmouth to unionize

In a first for Dartmouth

College, student workers have

voted to unionize.

The college announced the

successful vote Wednesday

involving around 150 students

working in the dining hall that

provides meals to students living

in college housing. It had pledged

to remain neutral during the

election and said it accepted the

results. The vote, according to the

Dartmouth, was 52 to 0. It was

tallied by the National Labor

Relations Board.

The push by the Student

Worker Collective at Dartmouth

started in January. Some of its

concerns were specific to work

conditions, including a demand

to pay all workers for missed

hours due to covid-19 isolation.

But it went beyond dining,

accusing the administration of

failing to respond to a range of

issues including mental health

and rising rents.

Dartmouth joins Hamilton

College in New York, Grinnell

College in Iowa and Wesleyan

University in Connecticut where

undergraduates voted in the past

two years to unionize, according

to the National Center for the

Study of Collective Bargaining in

Higher Education and the

Professions at Hunter College.

Graduates students at the

University of New Mexico,

University of California and Clark

University in Massachusetts have

also formed unions in those two

years. The Columbia graduate

teaching and research assistants

walked off the job in 2018 to try to

pressure the university to

recognize their decision to

unionize. The union, which has

about 3,000 members, reached a

tentative agreement with

Columbia earlier this year.

— Associated Press

DIGEST

Politics & the Nation

BY JOEL ACHENBACH

An important detail went
largely unnoticed amid the cele-
brations two decades ago of the
mapping of the human genome:
The job wasn’t really done. The
historic sequencing of the rough-
ly 3 billion letters that represent
the blueprint of humans was only
about 92 percent complete.
Scientists had done all they
could do with the technology of
the day, and soon after the turn of
the century, they published their
final map. But sections of the
genome remained mysterious,
with repeated letters that ran on
and on like a needle skipping on a
scratched record album. The
mapping of those sections was
kicked down the road, to some
future era when new technol-
ogies would complete the job.
That future has arrived. In a
paper published Thursday in the
journal Science, a massive collab-
oration of researchers from gov-
ernment, academic and private
organizations, called the Telom-
ere-to-Telomere consortium, pro-
duced the first full, “gapless”
human genome.
“Hallelujah, we finally finished
one human genome,” Evan
Eichler, a University of Washing-
ton geneticist and one of the
leaders of the project, said in a
news briefing Thursday.
A raft of other papers in Sci-
ence and in the journals Nature
and Genome Research expanded
on the significance of the mile-
stone and its potential applica-
tions.
“If there’s any blueprint on this
planet we should want to know
from one end to another, it’s
humans,” Eric D. Green, director
of the National Human Genome
Research Institute, said in an
interview.

The feat opens up new territo-

ries for researchers and could

have practical applications in the

realm of personalized medicine.

The newly sequenced sections of

the genome contain genes that

are consequential in some diseas-

es, scientists said.

The full human genome will

serve as a reference guide to

genetic variations seen in human

beings, particularly as more ge-

nomes from diverse populations

across the planet are fully se-

quenced and build out the library

of blueprints. That will also pro-

vide a better understanding of

the tree of life, because many

species of plants and animals

have genomic sections similar to

the hard-to-map parts of the

human genome, said Karen Miga,

a geneticist at the University of

California at Santa Cruz and

co-founder of the T2T consor-

tium.

Moreover, these newly

mapped sections — the previous-

ly sidestepped 8 percent of the

genome — could provide insights

into the mechanisms of aging,

Miga said.

“There are these incredibly

large and persisting gaps that

have been in our genome for

decades and they represent really

important parts of our genome,”

she said. “If we didn’t have these

regions, we wouldn’t have life as

we know it.”

The scientists do not claim

that this is “the” human genome.

It is “a” human genome. That

raises the obvious question of

whose genome it is, and there the

story is complicated. It is not any

one person’s genome.

People have two of copies of

chromosomes, one from each

parent. But this research was

performed on a cell line devel-

oped decades ago that originated

with a rare type of tumor — called

a “complete hydatidiform mole”

— that formed at the union of a

single sperm and an ovum that,

in a biological quirk, lacked the

woman’s DNA. According to the

National Institutes of Health, the

donors are not known.

“This is a unique cell line that

represents no person that ever

lived,” said Adam Phillippy, a

co-founder of the consortium

and head of the Genome Infor-

matics Section at the National

Human Genome Research Insti-

tute.

Green, the NIH official,

worked on the earlier Human

Genome Project, the decade-long

federal government effort that at

the turn of the century found

itself in a sharp-elbowed race

with a private venture, Celera

Genomics, headed by J. Craig

Venter. The race ended in a sort of

truce, with both efforts publish-

ing their initial sequences in the

journals Science and Nature in

February 2001, with more precise

versions coming two years later.

But the genome still had gaps.

These were sections with redun-

dancies that made their mapping

impossible. The same letters

would appear again and again, at

great length. The repeated sec-

tions were like jigsaw puzzle

pieces with no features at all —

like a section of the puzzle show-

ing only blue sky. What went

where? The scientists essentially

decided they would do the sky

section of the jigsaw puzzle later.

Some of the gaps were on

telomeres, the caps at the ends of

chromosomes that have often

been compared to the aglets that

protect the ends of shoelaces.

There were also gaps on centrom-

eres, the constricted regions that

separate two arms of the chromo-

some.

“There were parts of the hu-

man genome that contained DNA

that were so repetitive, and so

rugged and so difficult, that any

of the methods that were avail-

able at that time, they just

choked, they couldn’t do it,”

Green said.

The improved map was made

possible by new technologies for

reading very long sections of the

genome. Back to the jigsaw puz-

zle analogy: Puzzles with bigger

pieces are easier to put together.

Those technologies also im-

proved the accuracy of the se-

quencing. If these tools could be

reduced in cost, the researchers

said, that could help doctors

know exactly who they’re dealing

with at the genetic level, a leap

forward in “individualized medi-

cine.”

Deanna Church, a genome sci-

entist at Inscripta, who was not

part of the new research, said she

thinks this breakthrough in se-

quencing is just the start of a new

era in genome analysis.

“We want genomes from a lot

of different people, from all over

the world,” Church said.

In breakthrough, ‘gapless’ human genome is published

ISTOCK

A graphic representation of a DNA sequence. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, a consortium of researchers produced

the first full human genome, opening up new territories for scientists and potentially paving the way for applications in medicine.

Sequencing celebrated

two decades ago was

only about 92% complete

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