geneIQ – Genetics and Diagnostics

As soon as the structure was published a lot of related discoveries were made and genetics made a giant leap from the times of Gregor Mendel and his experiments on peas. We started to understand how the color of pea flowers is inherited, what makes them look they do, how to change the color if we want to do it.

The tools and methods that were developed over the past 60 years made it possible to cut DNA, clone it, sequence it and manipulate in multiple different ways. We started understanding the molecular basis of genetics, however, when we thought we knew it all it became obvious that we finding more questions. For the long time the central dogma was DNA to RNA to protein. We now know that not all RNAs are translated into proteins. We also know that regulators of gene expression such as promoters, enhancers or RNAi are located in intergenic areas, therefore so called “junk DNA” is not so junk after all. This is just the start of our modern understanding of genetics. We are trying to understand the molecular basis of disease and all those aspects are very important.

Further progress in our understanding was made when in 2003 the whole human genome was sequenced. We hoped that it will make things clear, yet it did not clarify everything. And the more genomes we started sequencing the more we started realizing that we are all quite different from each other and there are more challenges now ahead of us.

I think that partly the never ending puzzle of four bases in the genome that makes genetics so exciting. There is always something exciting to find and explain. Yet, at the same time we do not have know everything about inheritance to be able to use genetics in medicine. We just need to be mindful that there still could be pitfalls that we do not know about.