Setting it Straight: Back to Basics
In Professor Doherty's latest column, he takes a closer look at DNA, genomics and how these might help us to better understand COVID-19.
"Maybe you’ve paid $100 or more, ordered a kit, taken a mouth-swab, dropped that into the clear liquid in the tube provided, sealed it up and mailed it back to Ancestry DNA, LivingDNA, MyHeritageDNA, 23and Me, or one of the other commercial operations that analyse human genomes. Using strategies that depend on robotics and high-tech equipment, these 'ancestral DNA' companies look at a million or so 'sequencing snapshots' of the three billion base pairs aligned along the 23 chromosomes of the human genome..."
About Laureate Professor Peter Doherty
Nobel Laureate Professor Doherty, University of Melbourne, Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, is the patron and namesake of the Doherty Institute. He has been involved in research on infection and immunity for 50 years. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1996 with Swiss colleague Rolf Zinkernagel for their discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell-mediated immune defence and the biological role of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC).