just read this quote "The Human Genome Project, and everything after it, has completely transformed our view of biology."

Really? I can think of little about our *view of biology* that has changed because of the human genome project. Can anyone give me a concrete example?
well this has been interesting and more heated than I'd been hoping. At no point did I suggest or do I think that the HGP has not made a huge impact on human genetics, disease and otherwise. It was the 'transformed our view of biology' part that I thought was a massive overclaim.
I still feel that. The best example I saw was that the seq technologies spawned by HGP have changed biology and undoubtedly yes. I still find that 'this led to that which allowed the next thing' is a bit tenuous but ultimately I agree with this.
but "it changed our view of gene regulation" is nuts. Did we not know about promoters and enhancers, close and long range effects...I dunno...back in the 90s? Calling them super enhancers or TADs or whatever you want doesn't change the basic view.
of course that's a personal opinion, feel free to disagree. But when I think of a gene and it's transcriptional regulation I could dig out lecture notes from 1990 and they wouldn't be far off.
people mentioned that we have changed our views of alternative splicing due too HGP. Again..really?? I can't think of any change whatsoever except maybe microexons? The basic regulatory mechanisms are precisely as they were known in the 1990s. And as for miRNAs...
...those were discovered in C.elegans by heroic forward genetics from Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun and their colleagues...and in the days before any animal genome.

So sure seq tech - transformative. Gene regulation? No. Our view is the same view, fleshed out. That's my take.
You can follow @andy_utoronto.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: