“Scientists decode human genome’s instruction manual”

Hi, today i wll write a summary of a veri interesting article i found in a britsh newspaper called The Guardian.

Almost a decade after the human genome project laid bare the building blocks of life, scientists have figured out how they work together to create a living person.
About 25.000 genes are needed to make a healthy human being, but no one has explained how they combine and why they combine to make a person, until now.

California researchers have published like a manual that explains how genes are orchestrated inside cells; the advantages of the work that scientists have developed, is that they think that this work could be useful in many health treatments such as in cancer and mental disorders like squizophrenia.

And as we all now, the specific cellular expression is controlled by chemical switches that turn off and on determined genes; Scientists are also trying to decipher the chemical switches that control the entire expression gene machine, or as they call it, it is the “epigenome”.

A team led by Joseph Ecker at a university in California, studied human skin and stem cells with the objective to complete their first epigenomic map. By comparing this with the epigenome of diseased cells, scientists will be able to work out how glitches in the epigenome lead to cancers and other mental diseases for example. So this work will help to understand how a normal cell differs to a disease cell, which will lead scientists to understand the pathway of various diseases.

Previous studies suggest that everything around us, from what we eat to what we breathe affects our epigenome, leading to the expression of several medical conditions.

To finish the summary I would like to quote Linda Birbaum, director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences “Science has matured to a point that we can now map the epigenome of a cell”.