" what you what regard as some of the "lots and lots of benefits from knowing the human genome.""

In many of the cases the important thing is the techniques we learned to do fast and cheap as a result of the human genome project (HGP).

1.  We can do all kinds of DNA law enforcement things that without the HGP would be expensive, slow or in many cases impossible.

2.  We can now sequence a brand new virus in a day or two rather than months.  We can also custom make DNA in any sequence we desire and have developed simple methods to make RNA from that DNA.  The net result was back in January after the Chinese gave the world the first sequence on the virus that causes covid-19 within a couple of days two different groups knew what RNA sequence they needed to make to prepare a vaccine.  By the end of February they had made those RNAs and formulated them into an injectable and shown that those vaccines would produce a G type antibody known to be effective against this virus in animals.  By April we knew that those vaccines produced the same effective antibodies in humans and we had done preliminary safety studies in humans.  In any rational world we would have been mass producing both of those vaccines and injecting them into the public by last June.  All we have learned since last April was those two vaccines are both over 90% effective.  Last April all we could have said is based on the last 100 years of data on vaccines those two vaccines should have been at least 50% effective as a conservative estimate.  None of this could have happened without the HGP.

The UK today is sequencing the virus from about 0.5% of the total number of patients.  There are good reasons to do this.  This is how you spot problem mutants fast before they spread world wide (you hope).  Without the HGP such massive sequencing was not even a dream.

3.  We can do targeted sequencing on medical patients looking for known problem mutants fast and cheap when the patient exhibits clinical signs.  For example the price tag to do my personal cystic fibrosis gene was $150 twelve years ago.  At that time they only looked for the 35 most common functional mutants.  I really do not know the price today but it likely is less and the screen will be for possible mutants at every single base.   The result of being able to do CF at this level of detail is we now are identifying mutants that are close to normal function but when combined with any of the mutants that fully disable the gene can still result in clinical issues that are treatable thus extending life expectancy of impacted individuals.

4. Today we can routinely do sequencing on single cells from embryos and avoid implanting an embryo that is going to end up with bad genetic issues such as triploid at chromosome 21 or homozygous for a severe CF mutation.  The net result is thousands of healthy kids are born to parents who might have known they had a one in four chance of giving birth to a kid with a homozygous lethal.  Some of this could have been done before the HGP but not nearly as accurately, nor as fast and cheaply.

5.  We have done total sequences on all kinds of plants and animals.  An example of a benefit from such work is we can do special sequences on a bull Holstein calf right after birth and get an excellent idea if that bull is worth keeping alive and testing as a potential semen source to use in AI.  Without these kinds of techniques our US herd of Holstein dairy cattle would probably only have yearly milk production of 75% of what they produce today.  Some 99% of those bull calves are going into the veal market or going into MacDonald's hamburgers.  The sooner you can decide and the more accurately you can make the decision as to the fate of the calf the better.  The net result to the consumer is cheaper milk, cheese and butter.  This item alone has saved consumers more than was spent on the HGP.  A few pennys a gallon add up to big bucks pretty fast.

This is getting pretty far from honey bees.  I would love to include a honey bee example but I do not know of one.  In the next 20 years I expect to see honey bee examples.  But, it is going to be slow because the honey bee genome has certain features that make it a particularly difficult thing to deal with using today's sequencing methods.  In theory there is no reason the same types of selection could not be done with honey bees that were done with Holsteins.  In practice the details of honey bee DNA makes it very hard.  Consider Randy's mite resistant project.  Think about how much he could benefit if he could clip a wing from a drone and do DNA stuff that would tell him if that drone has tons of mite resistance characters or few mite resistant characters and get the answer for $50.  He could screen 100 drones and find the best five and use those five for II and make several mated queens.  Use those queens known to have superior sperm to raise more queens which could be open mated.  Doing some scheme like this could let him make the progress in one year that will take him five or more years using current methods.  And you do not need to even know what genes carry the desired trait.  You need to spend money up front to develop correlations between marker regions in the DNA and the trait you are selecting for.  Much of the money you spend here goes to a statistician who is capable of analyzing the data.

Dick

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