Evolution of man – Singapore joins first steps of gene study

November 5th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Singapore: How humans evolved could one day be scientifically reconstucted through a project involving Singapore’s A*STAR scientists, who will help collect tissue and DNA samples from 10,000 species of animals.

Scientists from Singapore’s A*STAR’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) will team up with 70 leading scientists from major zoos, museums, research centres and universities in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia in the effort called the Genome 10K Project.
Led by Prof Byrappa Venkatesh, who heads the Comparative Genomics Laboratory at IMCB and who is one of the chairpersons of the Genome 10K committee, the project will create an invaluable repository of DNA sequences for comparative studies on a scale never done before.

The A*Star scientists participating in the international genome project will be led by Professor Byrappa Venkatesh (left). — PHOTO: ZAOBAO

Taking Darwin’s theory of evolution to another level,the project will allow scientists to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the human and other vertebrate genomes.

“Genomes contain information from the past – they are molecular fossils – and having sequences from vertebrates will be an essential source of rich information” said Nobel Laureate Dr Sydney Brenner, who is Scientific Advisor to A*STAR Chairman and co-head of the IMCB laboratory.

“The most challenging intellectual problem in biology for this century will be the reconstruction of our biological past so we can understand how complex organisms such as ourselves evolved” he added.

Aside from being able to compare animal and human genomes, scientists will also be able to understand the genetic changes and adaptions that that occur in vertebrates.

This will help in conservation efforts as scientists may be able to predict how animals respond to climate change, emerging diseases, and competition.

Said Prof Venkatesh, “This project will not only generate sequences of all important vertebrate genomes that we were contemplating to sequence, but also will give us access to the latest sequencing technologies and sequence analysis tools for genomic studies in Singapore.”

The proposal for the project, launched in April 2009, is outlined in a paper entitled “A proposal to obtain whole genome sequence for 10,000 vertebrate species”, which will be published in the Journal of Heredity.

The initiators of the Genome 10K project include Prof David Haussler, Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz; Dr Stephen J. O’Brien, Chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute and Prof Oliver A. Ryder, Director of Genetics at the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research and Adjunct Professor of Biology at UC San Diego.

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