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What is the ‘Human Genome Project-Write’

(HGP-Write)?

Just like Moore’s Law, with the cost of circuitry and

computing power dropping exponentially, there’s

been a drop in the cost of DNA sequencing –

reading DNA – over the last 20 years. What we hope

to do with this new HGP-Write project is to stimulate

technology development, to increase the rate at

which the price of writing DNA declines so that, by

the time 10 years rolls around, the idea of writing a

full human genome won’t be quite so daunting.

You’ve made designer yeast genomes. How

would you synthesise human DNA?

The technology for putting together short bits of

DNA has been around since the early 1980s. Mature

DNA is a double helix, but chemically you can

synthesise 100 or maybe 200 mers [molecules

made from DNA letters] in a single-stranded format.

That’s the starting material. We put them together

into ever-bigger pieces, then insert those pieces

right into the yeast cell. It’s conceptually possible to

do something similar with human cells.

Why create synthetic human genomes?

There’s a lot we can do using model organisms like

mice, worms, fruit flies and so on. I’d be perfectly

happy if we simply worked in those arenas, but a lot

of our science is funded by health-related agencies

and they want to know what’s going on in human

cells. We could write thousands of human genomes

and test them in cells and compare them to each

other. All humans on the planet are different from

one another, such as in disease susceptibility, so

that’s one important practical application. Another

is that a lot of medicines are produced using

mammalian cells. For example, the original polio

vaccines, back in the 1960s, were actually made in

The original

polio vaccine was

infected with a virus. The

HGP-Write project could

allow scientists to create

virus-resistant cells to

make vaccines PHOTOS: GETTY X

The Human Genome Project involved reading the sequence of letters in DNA. Scientists

have now proposed writing DNA to make synthetic genomes. Lead researcher Prof Jef

Boeke told us how they would be used

Update

THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

“BY THE TIME 10 YEARS ROLLS AROUND,

THE IDEA OF WRITING A FULL HUMAN

GENOME WON’T BE QUITE SO DAUNTING”

GENETICS