The first female genome has been read

According to The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), geneticists at Leiden University have completed a DNA scan of the first woman and the first inhabitant of Europe, whose genome will be fully decoded by the end of the year. The honor was awarded to an employee of the University Medical Center, also geneticist Marjolein Kriek.

As the project manager Gert-Jan van Ommen stated, explaining the choice of a candidate for decoding, "if anyone can understand what his and her DNA sequence means, it's a clinical geneticist." In addition, where Watson is, "there should be a Scream," van Ommen joked, hinting at the consonance of the surnames of the current donor of genetic material and one of the discoverers of the double structure of DNA, Francis Crick. James Watson's DNA was decoded almost a year ago.

He also said that the decoding of female DNA is interesting not only from the point of view of establishing gender equality (five people whose genomes have been decoded to date – four men and one "synthetic man" whose DNA was made up of various fragments of male DNA), but also to study the rate of change of the X chromosome: "Although women don't have a Y chromosome, they do have two X chromosomes. Since half of the population, men, have it in a single variant, it has undergone more rigorous natural selection and should be less variable." The geneticist did not explain how two copies of the X chromosome in addition to the five studied could significantly clarify this issue.

So far, only the reading of a sequence of about 22 billion nucleotides in many thousands of fragments of the eight-fold multiplied for reliability DNA of Marjolein Creek has ended. The cost of the work carried out by the Illumina 1G device was about 40,000 euros. Now scientists have a complex computational task to "stitch" thousands of disparate fragments into a single genome based on overlapping parts of different fragments. It is expected that this work will take about another six months, after which we can hope for the publication of the first female genome and already talk about its decoding with good reason.

Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru according to the materials of the website "Gazeta.Ru»28.05.2008