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A great deal of waste? 25 years ago we thought that genomics would boost drug discovery and development. It didn't pan out quite like that but thanks to the Hum
by HarryHirsch 8y ago
A great deal of waste? 25 years ago we thought that genomics would boost drug discovery and development. It didn't pan out quite like that but thanks to the Human Genome Project costs for sequencing have dropped to almost nothing, and we have learned a great deal about protein evolution. Talk about waste!
- dekhn 8y agoI wouldn't really say the HGP taught us a lot about protein evolution. The original few genomes were snapshots of indivduals or amalgams. We do know a bit more about evolution from sequencing many more people (post-HGP), but it hasn't really been super-productive compared to previous work (note, my postdoc work was on protein functional evolution) from before the HGP. For example, Carl Woese, using only 16s RNA from a wide range of species and mostly hand-computed similarity clustering, managed to find a previously unrecognized kingdom. I don't think we've really had any truly revolutionary discoveries like that from HGP and post-HGP sequencing that focuses on humans.