{"id":216227,"date":"2025-06-26T15:42:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T15:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/216227\/"},"modified":"2025-06-26T15:42:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T15:42:09","slug":"uk-scientists-to-synthesise-human-genome-to-learn-more-about-how-dna-works-genetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/216227\/","title":{"rendered":"UK scientists to synthesise human genome to learn more about how DNA works | Genetics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to construct human genetic material from scratch to learn more about how DNA works and pave the way for the next generation of medical therapies.<\/p>\n

Scientists on the Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project will spend the next five years developing the tools and knowhow to build long sections of human genetic code in the lab. These will be inserted into living cells to understand how the code operates.<\/p>\n

Armed with the insights, scientists hope to devise radical new therapies for the treatment of diseases. Among the possibilities are living cells that are resistant to immune attack or particular viruses, which could be transplanted into patients with autoimmune diseases or with liver damage from chronic viral infections.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe information gained from synthesising human genomes may be directly useful in generating treatments for almost any disease,\u201d said Prof Jason Chin, who is leading the project at the MRC\u2019s Laboratory of Molecular Biology<\/a> (LMB) in Cambridge.<\/p>\n

Scientists have been able to read DNA for decades. The first draft of the human genome was announced 25 years ago<\/a>, a feat that set the stage for the ongoing genetics revolution. But while the technology for reading genomes has progressed rapidly, writing them has proved more difficult.<\/p>\n

For the SynHG project, researchers will start by making sections of a human chromosome and testing them in human skin cells. The project involves teams from the universities of Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Oxford and Imperial College London.<\/p>\n

Chin\u2019s team recently synthesised the complete genome of the E coli bacterium. But while the bug\u2019s genome carries about 4.5m base pairs, represented by the letters G, T, C and A, the human genome holds more than 3bn base pairs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you think about the human genome, it\u2019s more than just a set of genes on a string,\u201d said Dr Julian Sale, a group leader at the LMB. \u201cThere\u2019s an awful lot of the genome, sometimes called the dark matter of the genome, that we don\u2019t know what it does. The idea is that if you can build genomes successfully, you can fully understand them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018If you think about the human genome, it\u2019s more than just a set of genes on a string,\u2019 said Dr Julian Sale, of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Photograph: Iliescu Catalin\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Embedded in the project is a parallel research effort into the social and ethical issues that arise from making genomes in the laboratory, led by Prof Joy Zhang at the University of Kent. \u201cWe\u2019re a little way off having anything tangible that can be used as a therapy, but this is the time to start the discussion on what we want to see and what we don\u2019t want to see,\u201d Sale said.<\/p>\n

Prof Iain Brassington, who studies the ethics of genetic technology<\/a> at the University of Manchester, welcomed the project. While real-world applications are some way off, he said the work could lead to synthetic versions of mitochondria, the tiny battery-like structures that power biological cells. These could be used to prevent women who carry mitochondrial diseases from passing them on to their children. \u201cThe would-be mother would still need to undergo egg harvesting and IVF, but we\u2019d no longer need a donor, so we\u2019d halve the number of women burdened by the procedure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But the technology did pose problems, Brassington added. It might be possible to make bacteria that \u2013 thanks to their synthetic genomes \u2013 can digest petrochemicals, which could be useful for breaking down plastic waste and clearing up oil spills but would need to be handled extremely carefully. \u201cSuch bugs getting into the environment could be catastrophic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The spectre of designer babies is another valid concern. Parents could potentially use the technology to shape their children before birth, raising questions over how much control they should have. In another \u201cslightly wild\u201d idea, Brassington said celebrities might even start \u201clicensing\u201d parts of their genome to allow people to copy their genes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere might also be situations in which a man discovers that he is the \u2018genetic\u2019 parent of a child of whom he knew nothing,\u201d Brassington added. \u201cThis could already happen, of course, but he would currently know how it happened. SynDNA enables us to imagine a situation in which a replica of someone\u2019s DNA could be used to father a child with no cellular contribution from him at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, he said: \u201cGenerally, I think the concerns about designer babies all rely on some fairly far-fetched technology. I\u2019m not going to lose too much sleep over them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to construct human genetic material from scratch to learn more about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3846],"tags":[267,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-216227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-genetics","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114750434412252299","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}