38

­

2009

2009

2009

3.1

2008

3.2

Deciphering the Human Genome

The deciphering of the human genome was a milestone in research. The sequencing tech­

niques of the 1990s (capillary gel electrophoresis, automatic reading with a laser) were

used systematically and intensively. Craig Venter, in particular, decided to go ahead in an

industrial way and to finish much faster with the help of the first sequencing robots (only

3 years after 1998; Venter et al. 2001) than the group of typical university scientists and

professors who had been working on the project for more than 10 years.

This race has certainly greatly accelerated the sequencing of the human genome, but

also the development of the sequence analyses of bioinformatics that are necessary with it

in order to put everything together “correctly”. On the other hand, Craig Venter cannot be

said to have “won”. On the one hand, both working groups finished at about the same rate,

but on the other hand, it has been the case that the map (i.e., collecting genetic markers,

restriction sites, positional cloning of genes, etc.) of the public consortium under Erik

Lander has been instrumental in enabling Venter to put his sequences together so quickly

in the first place. Then in 2001, both consortia, the private company consortium and the

public research consortium, published a first “draft” sequence of the genome (Lander et al.

2001; review in Lander 2011) – a rough map, but not only of the genes, but precisely of all

the nucleotides that encode each gene.

This was the first time that the human genome had been “spelled out”. However, the

groundbreaking work of the ENCODE consortium (2012), for example, showed that after

spelling, reading only really begins with a hundredfold better genome and, above all, tran­

scriptome coverage, and one begins to understand the content and the subtleties of the

human genome.

These results, which have continued to grow over the years, are now available on vari­

ous entry pages.

For example, one can also seek out these results at NCBI for questions and analysis,

e.g., via the link https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/info/ENCODE.html.

Entry Page of the Human Genome Project

A particularly good general access to human genome analysis and its history is provided

by the entry page of the Human Genome Project.

3  Genomes: Molecular Maps of Living Organisms