Translate int understandable language?????

Question

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080331/ap_on_sc/trolling_for_genes_9

btw, i alreddy understand the first part....part about the testing on babies i blanked out.

Answer 1

Don't understand. It's not technical. Read it again. Use a dictionary if necessary.

Answer 2

That's interesting, but not a terribly well written article.  Here's my take;  I hope it helps.

Scientists finished reading the DNA sequence of human beings a few years ago.  Using that info, they have now designed probes that allow DNA from patients and related or unrelated healthy people to be compared across the entire set of DNA, known as ‘the human genome’.  This technology has allowed rapid advances in the ability to identify DNA changes that play a role in diseases.

The basic idea is that people with the disease will have different DNA sequences from the healthy people.  So, spots where DNA sequences are known to vary between people are checked to find which variants are found in the sick people, but not the healthy ones.  There are 500,000 – 600,000 of these spots in the genome.  The sequence changes don’t necessarily cause the disease, but they provide hint about where to look for the gene changes that cause the disease:  if all the sick people have the same changes in their DNA it gives a hint that the disease is partly caused by something in the nearby genes.  With that info, scientists can look closely to find the specific disease associated changes.

This is what they will do in the screen of premature births = the will look for DNA changes in the premies that aren’t in the full-termers, and then look at nearby genes to see if one of them is changed in a way that causes premature birth.  These analyses are pretty much done by robots and computers because the amount of data is too large for humans to work with.

Once the changes are identified, then companies start offering tests to help people assess their disease risk.  In some cases, this is helpful for preventative medicine and family planning.

At the bottom of the article are some links to info about these sort of genome scans, and to the results of the scans that have been published.