Andrew Wu
Anthro 1
Fashion of Genetic Architecture Through Ancestors
Genetics pertains to the scientific study of inheritance and variation in living organisms. From around the 1800s, humans had a theory brewing about natural selection and inheriting traits and it became evident that scientists would later call this genes. Studying and understanding of all the genes of human beings and genetic change occurring over time allows anthropologists to a better representation of humans evolving and address various issues. The Human Genome Project (HGP) is the international, collaborative research program whose goal was the understanding and complete mapping of all the genes of human beings. All our genes together are known as our genome. Medicine has evolved tremendously since the earliest human civilizations, when the diagnosis and treatment of disease were far from scientific. During medieval times, medicine, relied heavily on supernatural beliefs. Genetic drift, gene flow, and Natural selection, are the innards that cause revolutions in allele frequencies over time. When one or more of these forces are acting in a population, evolution occurs. The workings of evolution do not act in isolation, the focus of population genetics is to understand the consequences of violating these assumptions. Agriculture takes part in an extensive role with environmental change, stable conditions, food and resources, and genetically modified organisms. Uncertainties surrounding genetics testing relinquishes the benefits of the Genome Project allowing physical anthropologists to address various diseases, studying genetic drift and natural selection.
The Human Genome Project (HGP) is a worldwide research project whose goal of analyzing the sequence of human DNA, determining the location of all the genes of human beings. Begun in 1990, the U.S. Human Genome project was originally planned to last 15 years to determine the sequence of the three billion chemical bases that make up human DNA.
The genetic map of the mouse has already led to many insights into human genetics. While the mouse genome is not heterogenous to human beings, it is particularly useful for comparisons because of the many biological similarities between the mouse and man. Studies found between twenty thousand and twenty five thousand genes supply the code for specific protein process that were estimated to be only a hundred thousand. A few diseases associated with genes: Alzheimer’s disease, Cancers, Diabetes, Down syndrome, Sickle-cell anemia, high blood pressure, and many more. One of the earliest first time actual use of gene therapy began on September 1990, with the treatment of a child suffering from a rare genetic immunodeficiency disease caused by the lack of adenosine deaminase (ADA). ADA-deficient people disrupts the body’s ability to defend itself against antigens acquiring viruses and bacterial infections due to their immune system not working properly. This child was treated with gene therapy and the disease was dealt with, but the ADA gene-corrected cells have to be re-infused every one or two months. The minor complication of repeated infusions is a small price to give up for a normal life. People with diabetes often have to track and adjust insulin levels daily. This is another representation of gene therapy, but this could not be done until the scientists knew exactly where and which gene was causing the problem. Now the genomic map is complete, scientists will be able to better cure or aid many diseases. With some of these diseases or conditions such as high blood pressure and cancer, they are not entirely controlled by genes. A individual that receives gene therapy could still get cancer from smoking. These people would still have to exercise and eat right to remain healthy to control blood pressure and reduce other problems.
Pharmaceutical advances in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer will be actualized first. After all, cancer is basically a genomic disease. Already, doctors can better categorize some cancers by examining the arrangement of genomic changes in an individual tumor rather than simply establishing the origins of that tumor; this refined categorization will often lead to more appropriate treatment. For example, The Pan-Cancer project was launched in 2012 as a next cogent step in TCGA studies. The project, provided TCGA genomic data from more than 5,000 tumor samples in 12 cancer types. This all acknowledges for the first time what is different as well as what is shared among cancers, and is helping put everything into a universal illustration. In the series of actions of the first experiment, a limited number of conglomeration were responsible for most cancer subtypes, and that mutations recurrently occured in certain regions in the genome. In the more recent studies, researchers overlooked nearly 5,000 tumors from 21 different cancer types, disclosing more than 30 new cancer genes. This brought up the idea that there are tons more of cancer genes to be defined, meaning additional tumor samples and cancer types essentially need to be analyzed to establish an index for comparison and a better understanding for a cure. With the enhancement of complex tools, medicine has changed for the better because of studies like the Genome Project. Doctors and scientists have developed ways to send doses by the individual and how your body will handle it from genes thanks to pharmacogenetics. Pharmacogenetics paved away from harmful side effects and make treatment faster and far more effective. Without pharmacogenetics is not a complete bust, there is an element called natural selection or adaptation.
Natural selection also known as survival of the fittest is the process through which organisms adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce offspring. This process occurs when individuals with certain genotypes are more likely than individuals with other genotypes to survive and reproduce, and passes on their alleles to the next generation. As Charles Darwin argued in Our Origins, if the following conditions are met, natural selection must occur: There is variation among individuals within a population in some trait. This variation is heritable. Variation in this trait is associated with variation in the environment. In the 21st century, the HIV and AIDS virus is a disease that attacks cells in the immune system and destroys a type of white blood cell. This is a serious issue because of the multiple and mysterious ways to contract the virus, and the longer an individual undergoes without treatment, can lead to AIDS. Scientists have different approaches to treat HIV, but not for AIDS. The virus is evolving so quickly, faster than humans can that thousands of human beings are dying every year from it. Another example is the flu, the flu virus arrives every year sometimes bigger and more destructive around the winter time. Humans take in a shot that infects the individual with a small dose of the virus to allow the red blood cells to conflict the virus. Mutation is one way for the cause of genetic variation which is how new virus form and grow. Mutation, change of genes and production of new alleles in a population, can be beneficial or harmful to the population. Natural selection determines if mutations are harmful and plays the main role in eliminating them. Other mutations are beneficial and help individuals reproduce which results in increase in population. Genotype (genetic structure) and phenotype (physical characteristic) variances are also impacted by the introduction of new mutations. Without genetic drift and gene flow natural selection would not be possible.
Gene flow is the movement and exchange of genes or alleles from one population of species to another. The flow of genes in and out of population due to migration of individuals can bring new genetic variation. For example if and asian person who is fully their ethnicity and a mexican person who is as well has a baby together. That baby could go on to having offspring another race bringing new genetic variation. The asian person has the dominant allele, even though there is an 50 percent chance for the baby looking mexican, the baby has a pretty good chance of appearing asian. When there is gene flow between populations, slight differences in a phenotype (physical characteristic) may occur because of combined gene pool. When gene flow is limited, phenotype and genotype (genetic makeup) differences widen between population and that may lead to the formation of new species. An example are bees. Bees carry pollen from one flower to another. They move genes during this process which can lead to the escape of genetically engineered genes. For humans, this is interbreeding, occurring across different population, gene flow occurs. As genetic drift is the change in allele frequencies of a population due to random chance events like natural or environmental occurrences, small populations are affected more often than the large ones. This is because when one individual dies in a small population, part of the gene pool is lost. But if same case happens to an individual in a large population, comparatively, the gene pool is intact so their gene has greater chance to be passed to their offspring, enabling the population to survive and reproduce. In other words, large populations are protected against the negative effects of genetic drift. The larger the sample size, the greater the probability of an accurate prediction. Even in a population if all individuals have the same opportunities to mate, their reproductive contributions to the next generation will vary due to random chance alone. In any population of any size, this error will cause gene frequencies to fluctuate from generation to generation. Genetic changes due to drift are neither directional nor predictable in any way. Regardless, genetic drift contributes to evolutionary change even in the presence of mutation, natural selection or gene flow.
