the.com/genome
a 3-billion-letter instruction manual you never read but follow perfectly
means the complete set of genetic material — all the DNA — in an organism, containing the instructions to build and run it.
from A 1920s coinage by German botanist Hans Winkler, who blended 'gene' (from Greek 'genos,' birth or kind) with the '-ome' of 'chromosome' to mean the whole genetic complement. That little '-ome' suffix proved oddly fertile, later spawning a whole family of words — proteome, transcriptome, microbiome — wherever scientists wanted to mean 'the complete set of.'
- shared dna
- You share about 50% with a banana
- junk myth
- Most DNA codes nothing for proteins at all
- length
- Stretched out, one cell's DNA spans two meters
- first map
- Reading it once took 13 years and billions
- viral tenants
- Ancient viruses left 8% of your genome behind
human genome project — international collaboration that mapped all 3 billion base pairs of human dna, completed 2003
wheat genome — sequenced in 2018, contains 107,891 genes across 21 chromosomes, more complex than human
covid-19 genome — 29,903 nucleotides sequenced in january 2020, enabled rapid vaccine development