Natalie Kister April 3, 2016
Current Event 16 Ippolito
At the University of Washington, a new sequencing technology has become available that holds the ability to sequence the genomes of other animals in much longer and more accurate strands. Prior to this new technology, computers that took care of genome mapping would become confused when it came across repeated patterns of genomes. As a result, long strands of DNA that researchers hoped to code would be broken up into smaller strands. As Evan Eichler explained, “Such assemblies can be like Swiss cheese with a lot of missing biological information in the gaps.” The difference in the old information and new information is significant. As opposed to the old technique of looking at 400,000 fragments of DNA, with the new SMRT sequencing technology, researchers and their computers are only observing 1,800 pieces, each about 800 times larger than before. The gaps that have now been closed helped the scientists come closer to a conclusion that could hold crucial biological information about why gorillas evolved the way they did and the reason that humans diverged from monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas. By looking at the newly sequenced genomes, it can be inferred how genes are controlled and how different environmental elements affected the gorillas’ ancestors. All of this newly learned information points to when and why humans developed on their own. Hopefully in the future, explains Eichler, this technology can become more accessible to human everyday use. With the current way of looking at smaller segments, Eichler describes, “...there is a chink in our armor. The work on gorilla and other human genomes clearly demonstrates that large swathes of genetic variation can't be understood with the short sequence-read approaches. Long read sequencing is allowing us to access a new levels of genetic variation that were previously inaccessible.” In the future there is hope that the price of such technology will decrease, thus making is more practical for all people.
This new technology is very exciting to the area of genome mapping. As Eichler stated, the information that was previously missing from any genome maps can hold important clues to evolutionary history. This science can hopefully be applied to family DNA mapping where it can help detect genetic diseases earlier, allowing any possible treatments to begin before symptoms show. At the end of the article, it is explained how the technology usage is extremely expensive, thus not a practical tool for everyday use at the moment. There is hope that in the future, however, it will become more common and the price will drop.
This article was from a website I had not previously used but upon first glance it looked very reputable. The article was error free until the last two paragraphs which concerned me slightly, but the research was all conducted at reputable universities with large research facilities. I chose to read this article because the initial picture on the cover drew my attention. It had a small information blurb at the start to provide some background knowledge and let you become familiar with the topic at hand which I found very helpful. Over all I think it was a very well written article with interesting information. The topic drew my interest and I will be sure to look into more information about DNA sequencing and how it can help humans as it becomes readily available.
University of Washington Health Sciences/UW Medicine. "A new approach to sequence and
assemble primate genomes: Technical advances in reading long DNA sequences have
ramifications in understanding primate evolution and human disease." ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily, 31 March 2016.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160331153942.htm>.
assemble primate genomes: Technical advances in reading long DNA sequences have
ramifications in understanding primate evolution and human disease." ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily, 31 March 2016.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160331153942.htm>.
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ReplyDeleteFord Neild April 3rd, 2016
ReplyDeleteCurrent Event 16 Comment
Dear Natalie,
I felt that, overall, you explained the article in very concise manner without skipping over any of the essential details, as many people often do when summarizing. First, you were able to support your claim by inserting statistics and facts from the article, something that many people struggle with in these current events. Prior to reading your summary I would have never guess that all of our DNA could be known in such little time and your statics helped me consider this amazing possibility. Second, you described the scientist’s viewpoint in a very interesting way that held the reader's attention. Often people do not sound passionate when arguing scientists opinions, but you did a fantastic job of that in this description. One reason you were able to do this is through the use of the quote,“...there is a chink in our armor. The work on gorilla and other human genomes clearly demonstrates that large swathes of genetic variation can't be understood with the short sequence-read approaches. Long read sequencing is allowing us to access a new levels of genetic variation that were previously inaccessible.” It helped add a scientist's description that further captured the reader and added a new perspective. Thirdly, your descriptive vocabulary showed real depth of understanding on your part and added additional detail that helped to create a clear image of this previously confusing article.
Though, overall this article was very well written, there is room for improvement yet. Previously, I had commented that your descriptive vocabulary was intelligent and descriptive, however, for many of these words, they were too complex. To fix this, I recommend putting in parentheses the definition of the word. For example, I was not familiar with the term,”genomic sequencing”. After doing personal research I found that genomic sequencing is a laboratory process that determines the complete DNA sequence of an organism's genome at a single time. This entails sequencing all of an organism's chromosomal DNA as well as DNA contained in the mitochondria and, for plants, in the chloroplast. In your relevance paragraph, you consistently mention important clues to evolutionary history. I was disappointed that you did not give specific examples of these clues. If these were not mentioned in the article, I recommend doing independent research in order to fix this issue.
From your summary I learned a lot. Specifically, I was amazed by how we were able to map our entire genome with such accuracy. Personally, I worked on genomic sequencing over the summer while interning at Rockefeller University, so this article concerned me deeply.
University of Washington Health Sciences/UW Medicine. "A new approach to sequence and assemble primate genomes: Technical advances in reading long DNA sequences have ramifications in understanding primate evolution and human disease." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 31 March 2016.
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Dear Natalie:
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your review of “A New Approach to Sequence and Assemble Primate Genomes.” My favorite part of the review was your enthusiastic tone. Most reviews sound very bland and monotonous but your upbeat tone and obviously great interest in the subject made the review very pleasant to read. For your summary, you did a fantastic job seamlessly weaving in quotes from the article. My favorite quote being, “‘Such assemblies can be like Swiss cheese with a lot of missing biological information in the gaps.’” Lastly, I thought that your critique of the credibility of the article was very in depth and thorough, analyzing both why and why not the article was credible.
While your review of the article had several good aspects, there are a few areas in which it could have been improved. After reading your article I was left with two questions. The first being why the experiment was so expensive. It may not have been possible to give an explanation based on the information of the article but an explanation would have been helpful. The second question I was left with was “how is the experiment conducted?? How did the procedure change?” Again, you may not have been able to answer this question based on the information presented but I feel as though this is a crucial piece of information on this topic. Along with the questions I was left with, I would appreciated it in future article if you could give the full name of abbreviations such as SMRT to help the reader understand which procedure you are referring to.
After reading your review I’m very interested in the results of this new procedure. I look forward to seeing how the discovery of this procedure affects the current theory on the evolutionary history of Homo Sapiens.
I think Natalie did an excellent job reviewing this article, and I enjoyed many aspects of it. Specifically, I think she did very well in keeping the review concise and getting right to the point. This made the review so much better because it did not include much useless information that could potentially bore the reader. Another thing I enjoyed about this review was how well Natalie integrated quotes and kept the flow of the review. One final thing I enjoyed about this review was how well she critiqued the article. I enjoyed how she analyzed the credibility of the article, going into why it is or is not credible.
ReplyDeleteAlthough this was a great review, I feel that there are a couple of things that could be improved upon. One thing that I think would make this review even better would be if maybe Natalie went into a little more depth on why the experiment was so expensive. Another thing that would’ve been nice is if maybe Natalie gave some examples of the clues to evolutionary history that she brought up in the review.
I was very intrigued by the accuracy we have in mapping our genomes as explained by this review. After reading this review, I became very curious about the results of this experiment so I wonder what effect this will have on our current theory of evolution.