Quotes About Genome

Simple genome engineering of bacteria and yeast is just the beginning of the rise of the true biohackers. This is a community of several thousand people, with skill sets ranging from self-taught software hackers to biology postdocs who are impatient with the structure of traditional institutional lab work.

The truth is much different. Bacteria literally analyze the antibiotics that they encounter and generate responses to them. They actually remake their genome in order to alter their physical form. And this solution? It is passed on to their descendants. In essence, this is the passing on of acquired characteristics, something Lamarck insisted was possible and that neo-Darwinians have ridiculed ever since.

Some scientists have gone further and have speculated that there is a "God gene" that predisposes the brain to be religious. Since most societies have created a religion of some sort, it seems plausible that our ability to respond to religious feelings might be genetically programmed into our genome.

I'm not keen on interfering with nature; I don't want to edit my genome.

Because genes work in combination, the incremental effect of adding a new gene to a genome may be not linear, but exponential.

One key lesson learned from mapping the genome is that access to a rough initial map proved crucial to developing more detailed maps of small individual human differences.

What Jacob and Monod had discovered, in essence, was that each gene acts like a single line in a computer program.

In place of a view of the genome as a static blueprint that operates independently of experience and only up to the moment of birth, we have come to understand the genome as a complex, dynamic set of self-regulating recipes that actively modulate every step of life. Nature is not a dictator hell-bent on erecting the same building regardless of the environment, but a flexible Cub Scout prepared with contingency plans for many occasions.

They would certainly have been simpler than the earliest known microbial mats, but somewhere in your genome there will be sequences of DNA that have been faithfully passed down across the great sweep of geological time, and if you have children, you'll pass these four-billion-year-old messages on to them.

Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that's what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should've stopped, and that's cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

If you get a personal genome, you should be able to get personal cell lines, stem cell derived from your adult tissues, that allow you to bring together synthetic biology and the sequencing so that you can repair parts of your body as you age or repair things that were inherited disorders.

By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.

If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem but for our population... we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense.

Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.

Each gene is a stretch of DNA, made up of thousands of bases.

And they certainly would not have guessed that the human genome is partly composed from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors, or that life as we know it may have gotten its start four billion years ago from viruses.

Everybody's genome is like a book with 23 chapters," he told them. "You have two copies of each chapter, one from your dad and one from your mom. Whole genome sequencing looks for everything. It looks for missing chapters, missing paragraphs, every misspelled word.

People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.

DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.

The successful mapping of the human genome was only a first big step, it turns out, one that would become the foundation for yet another quantum leap in biology. More advanced research, especially in the last decade, points to the advent of a new field called epigenetics, which studies the human epigenome.

The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.

The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome—plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness.

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. —Richard Dawkins