George Church

100,000 British invited to post their genomes online.

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A hundred thousand British volunteers could have their genetic information available to anyone in the world. Some scientists warn the Personal Genome Project may be a step too far for confidentiality.

The project is US-based and allows people to find out more about their genetic profiles, plus contribute to advances in medical science. Volunteers from America and Canada have already joined the project.

To participate, people have to be at least 18 years old and understand the risks and benefits when they apply online. They fill out a detailed health history and complete a 19-page consent form.

They will later get their genome analysis and have a four-week “cooling off” period before deciding if they want their data to go online, Reuters reported.

Discovering the role of the genetic code may help to battle complex diseases like cancer, or discover why some people have special traits like perfect musical pitch, according to Stephan Beck, professor of medical genomics at the UCL Cancer Institute and director of the British project.

The project aims to sequence 50 people’s genomes, the 3 billion chemical pairings that make up human DNA, in the first year of the project.

The volunteers will be warned of possible implications, as there are a few challenges that the project faces, and the main one is ethical.

The genome gives a person’s entire genetic information, and revealing the data could also disclose the presence of yet undetected illnesses or elevated risks of developing conditions like Alzheimer’s.

Another controversy is that an open-access DNA database could trigger fraudulent use of people’s information.
Scientists are also cautious about the project.

“GeneWatch UK’s view is that people should think twice before agreeing to share their genome openly. Remember your DNA contains a unique genetic code which can be used to track you and identify your relatives. Stored online it will be accessible to police, security and border agencies based in any country,” Helen Wallace, of GeneWatch British non-profit group specializing in genetics, told The Guardian.

The UK is the first country to join the research which was launched by George Church of Harvard Medical School in 2005. He believes breakthroughs in medicine aren’t possible without “big datasets about individuals and that is what the Personal Genome Project offers.”

In the US, Church managed to find 3,000 volunteers for his project, and several hundred more in Canada, of those only 200 genomes have been sequenced.

The scientist also forecast that genome sequencing will speed up as the cost continues to fall dramatically – it has come down from $1 billion 20 years ago to a few thousand dollars nowadays.

A total of 25,000 human genomes were sequenced around the world in various projects, but just fractions are available to the public.

The First Book To Be Encoded in DNA.

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Two Harvard scientists have produced 70 billion copies of a book in DNA code –and it’s smaller than the size of your thumbnail.
Despite the fact there are 70 billion copies of it in existence, very few people have actually read the book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves in DNA, by George Church and Ed Regis. The reason? It is written in the basic building blocks of life: Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

Church, along with his colleague Sriram Kosuri, both molecular geneticists from the Wyss Institute for Biomedical Engineering at Harvard, used the book to demonstrate a breakthrough in DNA data storage. By copying the 53,000 word book (alongside 11 jpeg images and a computer program) they’ve managed to squeeze a thousand times more data than ever previously encoded into strands of DNA, as reported in the August 17 issue of the journal Science. (To give you some idea of how much information we’re talking about, 70 billion copies is more than three times the total number of copies for the next 200 most popular books in the world combined.)

Part of DNA’s genius is just how conspicuously small it is: so dense and energy efficient that one gram of the stuff can hold 455 billion gigabytes. Four grams could in theory hold ever scrap of data the entire world produces in a year. Couple this with a theoretical lifespan of 3.5 billion years and you have a revolution in data storage, with wide ranging implications for the amount of information we could record and store.

Don’t expect your library to transform from paperbacks to vials of DNA anytime soon though. “It took a decade to work out the next generation of reading and writing of DNA – I’ve been working on reading for 38 years, and writing since the 90s,” Church tells TIME.

The actual work of encoding the book into DNA and then decoding it and copying it only took a couple weeks. “I did it with my own two hands!” says Dr. Church, “which is very rare to have that kind of time to spend doing something like this.” Church and Kosuri took a computer file of Regenesis and converted it into binary code — strings of ones and zeroes. They then translated that code into the basic building blocks of DNA. “The 1s stand for adenine (A) or cytosine (C) and the zero for guanine (G) and thymine (T),” says Kosuri.  Using a computer program, this translation was simple.

While the future implications and applications are not yet clear, the DNA storage industry is moving at an incredible speed. “Classical electronic technology is moving forward something like 1.5 fold per year,” says Dr. Church, “whereas reading and writing DNA is improving roughly ten fold per year. We’ve already had a million-fold improvement in the past few years, which is shocking.”

Given that the genomics field has attracted its fair share of criticism — witness, for example, the firestorm that greeted biologist Craig Venter and his colleagues when they created the first synthetic cell in 2010 — there are ethical questions to address. Dr. Church and co-author Ed Regis have decided not to include a DNA insert of the book with the actual paper copy when it comes out in October because of this sensitivity.

“We’re always trying to think proactively about the ethical, social and economic implications in this line of work,” says Dr. Church. He explains that the risks are relatively small, but both he and Dr. Kosuri mention that if it is possible to encode a book using DNA encode, it is also theoretically possible to encode a virus–though this would be a far-fetched scenario.

“The chances that something bad will come out of this is so small,” says Dr. Kosuri. “If someone really nefarious wanted to make a virus they would have to use a much larger chunk of DNA to encode function.”

Why make 70 billion copies of the book? “Oh that was a bit of fun,” says Dr. Church. “We calculated the total copies of the top 200 books of all time, including A Tale of Two Cities and the Bible and so on, and they add up to about 20 billion. We figured we needed to go well beyond that.”

Source: Time

 
Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/20/the-first-book-to-be-encoded-in-dna/#ixzz246tbt1He