Genome builders?

• April 29, 2024

Sixteen years ago the world met the first cloned mammal: Dolly the sheep. Beyond the amazement or fear that caused at the time, obtaining information in the molecular biology It has accelerated at an impressive rate due to the development of new technologies, more efficient, faster and more accessible.

This gives rise to a drawback: how to analyze and understand all that world of data and information to detect and solve biological problems? In the boom era of genome building, researchers combine advances in genomic sciences and computer machinery to create databases of biological information in an electronic book.

Computational genomics specialists of the Genomic Sciences Center of the UNAM guide other scientists into the depths of the nature of an organism. Its mission is to assist researchers in the studies of genes and genomes, in addition to modeling and predicting concepts of biology, such as the behavior of a cell.

One of the greatest achievements of the team, headed by the doctor Julio Collado Vides , was to obtain the complete sequence of the genome of the bacterium Escherichia colli, contribution published in 1997 in the journal Science , one of the most recognized in the scientific world. To date, the group's central project is the edition of the electronic book of the physiology of this and other bacteria.

Genomics is the study of the totality of the properties of the genome: structure, interaction and functions of its components. The genome is the genetic material of an organism, and contains all the information necessary for the creation and development of that being and the transfer of its characteristics from generation to generation.

The knowledge derived from the genomic sciences grows day by day. Only around 500 scientific articles per year are generated around Escherichia colli. "It is the best known organism at the molecular level. From it was born molecular biology, "says the university scientist.

The computational genomics group reviews and preserves the data captured in the scientific literature, which will then be interpreted by other researchers.

"We are curators, we read articles and extract evidence and discoveries, coding all that information in a computational structure that allows us to represent the pieces of the cell and their interactions", highlights Julio Collado.

Other scientists are responsible for understanding the meaning of these data and drawing conclusions, such as explaining why humans and flies are so different if their genome coincides by 60%; or why several members of a family develop certain types of cancers.

Faced with this panorama, Collado Vides wonders what is the fate of the bacterium Escherichia colli, as a subset of biological knowledge that can contribute to the genomics of the future. "We know so much about a single organism that the challenge is to integrate all the knowledge that scientists generate to represent the biological complexity."

With the first level infrastructure of the Computational Genomics Group, its members develop methods of predicting regulatory networks, transcription factors and functional associations between genes.

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