GENEs: Turn them ON/OFF anytime

The main building block of the human body is a gene. Some of the genes change with the environmental changes. The genes can be modified to change the conditions of the human body or even to fight with a disease. For your consideration, assume a recipe of a very delicious food dish. You know if everything goes right, the dish will be very tasty and perfect. But if something… any ingredient is added in wrong quantity, or even any thing which is not intended to be added is added to the food, what will happen? The food will be spoiled. Just the same is with human body, as everything is controlled by the genes (ingredient of human body), we can control the effects on human body (such as diseases). There are genes which start malfunctioning or start or stop working and so-called disease condition is set up in human body (not always but in many cases), we can turn on or off these genes to fight with the diseases.

It will be great if we could fight and prevent a disease for which we do not have a right drug. The scientists who succeeded in obtaining genetic blueprint, have now initiated a new project, which is an extension of the previous project which revealed genetic blueprints. They are working on world’s first project, where they are going to map key chemical changes that switch human genes on and off. The project will be of a great help to provide the necessary information to link human genetics and health. The Human Epigenome Project follows the completion of the Human Genome Project and aims to map the way methyl groups are added to DNA across the entire human genome. According to scientists, these "epigenetic" changes are believed to turn genes on and off. Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, and Epigenomics, a Berlin-based company, are leading the project.

"This is an extension of the Human Genome Project", says Stephan Beck, head of human sequencing at the Sanger Institute, which sequenced a third of the human genome. "The Human Genome Project has given us the genetic blueprint – the number and location of genes – but gives us very little about which genes are expressed when in different tissues and different cell types. "In most cases roughly 50 per cent of the reason for a disease can be ascribed to a person’s genes, he told. According to the group working on this project, the epigenetic factors contribute to the reasons of disease caused by the gene disorder. The team is aiming to map the methylation pattern (Methylation is a natural process that mainly occurs on cytosine, one of the four "letters" or bases that make up the DNA. When a methyl group is added on cytosine in the promoter region of a gene – the sequence that causes it to be expressed – the gene is switched off.) In 200 samples representing the entire human genome and all the major human tissues. They will then integrate the data with the human genome sequence to provide a key research resource. The team will start the project with the most characterized chromosome; number 22. The team hopes that their DNA methylation map could hold the potential for diagnosing diseases and could even predict a risk of cancer in a person before a gene mutation has occurred.