The Human Genome

ISBN: 9780123334459 出版年：2010 页码：600 Richards, Julia E Hawley, R Scott Academic Press_RM

The human genome sequence is the order in which the letters of the genetic alphabet, As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, are arranged along the chromosomal DNA strands that are tens, even hundreds of millions of letters in length. The whole length of the sequence, from one end to the other, measures more than three billion As, Cs, Gs, and Ts arranged one after another to spell out what individuals are made of and how cells operate. It starts at the top of chromosome 1 and runs down each chromosomal arm in the order in which the chromosomes were originally numbered according to their apparent sizes. The human genome sequence actually exists in a set of databases around the world, located in the countries that produced the sequence. The sequence is curated by places such as GenBank at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the University of California at Santa Cruz Genome Browser, and the Sanger Center in the European Union. A variety of important sites worldwide contain programs for genomic analysis and databases of information derived from the sequence, including the sites that house the sequence and other locations such as GeneCards at the Weizmann Center in Israel and GenomeNet in Japan. While these genome centers own the computers and the software, they do not legally own the sequence of the human genome in the sort of sense one normally consider for inventions or something that someone has authored.