This is completely MPSIMS, but I, and possibly one or two other board members, will think it’s interesting. Remember how big and exciting it used to be when a new full genome was sequenced, like ten years ago or so? You know, every few months, there’d be a news story about the dog genome being sequenced, or the cow, or whatever.
Well, I just finished discussing a paper that was published recently. In this paper, they sequenced the complete genomes of five strains of bacteria. Impressive, you say? Well, not really. Not only was it not the major goal of the research, but it wasn’t even part of the main paper. It was in the supplementary information. Five complete genomes. Buried in the “Oh, and we also did this, but we realize no one really cares about it” section. Crazy.
Progress marches onward.
The Human Genome Project (remember that) took 13 years. I remember seeing snippets on TV about it, they were trying to get people to wrap their heads around it. People that couldn’t wrap their heads around it because it didn’t mean anything to it. “It’ll fill up 10 filling cabinets” “It’ll cost 18 bajillion dollars” “It’s as long as a football field” (Okay, I made the last two up, but I remember them talking about it filling up X filing cabinets).
Bacterial genomes are a lot shorter than mammalian genomes.
This kind of exponential progress always blows my mind! The same thing also happens on Wikipedia. Seven or eight years ago, it was often the case that several hundred edits would go into crafting a single important article that, at the end of the day, was still just an incoherent pile of information without any references. Take a look at this diff from Periodic table, which shows over 500 edits from from July 2002 to July 2005 without any real progress.
Nowadays, new articles on even the most trivial things appear with fully fleshed-out structures and tons of footnotes. This is the very first version of Coprinellus impatiens, an obscure mushroom article written in August 2010.
Shit’s wild, son!
Haemophilus influenzae, the first independently reproducing organism (i.e. not a virus) to have the genome completely mapped, was sequenced only in 1995. The techniques and technology for sequencing genes are indeed relatively new, and yet have matured very quickly to allow genetic sequencing and modification on a scale unimaginable a couple of decades ago.
Stranger