A team of UK -based researchers is going, where no scientist has dared to write artificial human DNA from scratches. They are hoping that the project will answer fundamental questions about human genome and change our understanding of health and disease.
But the research topic, for clear reasons, is controversial. Scientists have clearly clarified to try to create a large -scale full synthetic human genome, beware of inspiring us in a diastopian, GattacaFuture full of designer infants.
Now, the world’s largest medical charity, Welcome Trust, coughs about $ 11.7 million (£ 10 million) to kickstart the Synthetic Human Genome Project (Synhg). Charity says that benefits are ahead of risks. Technology, it says, can be used to create new medical treatment, such as designer cell-based treatment and virus-resistant tissue transplant.
A professor at the University of Oxford, Jason Chin, will lead the project in collaboration with many other UK-based universities and research centers. In the next half decade, Chin and their colleagues have expected to create basic equipment, technologies and methods to allow researchers to make genomes from scratches.
Chin said in a statement, “The ability of human cells to synthesize large genomes including genomes, genome can change our understanding of biology and deeply change the horizon of biotechnology and medicine.”
Welcome Trust also contributed significant funds to the human genome project, which was completed 25 years ago. In fact, the creation of a human genome is even more ambitious than nothing and is expected to take decades, perhaps. Chin’s team recently synthesized full genome e coli Bacteria, but it is small potatoes next to a human genome, which is about 700 times larger.
“If you think of human genomes, it is more than a set of genes on a string,” a group leader in Julian Sales, MRC Molecular biology laboratorytold Mentor“There is a lot of genome, sometimes called the dark matter of the genome, that we do not know what it does. The idea is that if you can successfully build the genome, you can understand them completely.”
The first step of scientists will be to create a complete, synthetic human chromosome, which researchers plan to deal with the next five to ten years. Unlike genome editing, which works One or a handful of genes at a timeGenome synthesis allows researchers to replace DNA on a large scale. This can help determine that the large swaths of our DNA – in which we do not know much about our health and characteristics.
Chin said in a statement, “The ability of human cells to synthesize large genomes including genomes, genome can change our understanding of biology and deeply change the horizon of biotechnology and medicine.”
Some researchers worry that the ability to write human genetic code may give researchers a scary amount of control over human living systems. This one day can be used with synthetic humans, biological weapons, or even human DNA with a genetic scientist at Bill Arnetshaw, University of Edinburgh. BBC News, But he says that the technology required to do those things is still far away.
The project is trying to deal with prickly moral issues of creating a human genome head. Welcom Trust is financing a parallel research effort in social and moral issues of creating a human genome in a laboratory led by Joy Zhang at the University of Kent University.
“This technique is going to develop one day, so now we are trying to make it responsible at least as much as possible and in advance to face moral and moral questions. [a] Welcoming Senior Research Manager Tom Collins said, “The way possible,” BBC News.
