Decoding the Human Genome
Chapter 9: The Biotechnology Revolution

The Human Genome Project is a research effort trying to identify all of the genes in human DNA and to determine the sequence of the three billion bases that make up human DNA. You can create a model to help appreciate how many base pairs there are in the human genome if you…

Try This

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1. Choose a page from a book that has only text, no illustrations. Count the number of characters (letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces) in 10 lines of text. Divide this number by 10 to obtain the average number of characters per line.
2. Count the number of lines on the page. Multiply the number of lines by the average number of characters per line to obtain the average number of characters per page. Multiply this by the number of pages in the book.
3. Let each character represent a DNA base. Divide the number of characters in the book by two. This will represent the number of base pairs in the book.
4. The human genome has about three billion base pairs. Calculate the number of books you would need to store all this information.

Analyze Your Results

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1. What advantage is there in having so many base pairs in the human genome?
2. What are the advantages of identifying the sequences of base pairs in the human genome?

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