23andMe Genetic Sequencing, Human Knockout genes, Coral Bleaching
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2017
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
23andMe is one of the biggest providers of home genetic testing kits and if you live in the UK, it's the only one that also includes various genetic analyses relevant not just to ancestry, but also to health. After a previous ban, the Food and Drug Administration for the first time approved marketing of the 23andMe Genetic Health Risk tests for diseases in the US. Adam Rutherford talks to geneticist Professor Matthew Cobb of the University of Manchester and to medical ethicist Dr Sarah Chan of the University of Edinburgh about how useful this genetic information can be and about who owns the data.
New research published this week has revealed something really quite bizarre about our own genomes: that we can survive normally with a considerable number of dysfunctional genes. We've got around 20,000 genes, and you might think that you need them all, as when they don't work, they could lead to a serious health condition. But from a study of more than 10,000 people from Pakistan more than 1300 mutations were found to have no effect on their health. Geneticist Robert Plenge explains the research.
The Great Barrier Reef has taken another huge hit with a mass bleaching event occurring a second year in a row. Over two thirds of the reef is now seriously damaged. Professor Jorg Wiedenmann of the University of Southampton explains that if bleaching events continue to happen at this rate, the world's largest coral reef will never recover.
Transcript
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| 0:29.0 | Hello You this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 13th of |
| 0:34.9 | April 2017 I'm Adam Rutherford. The Great Barrier Reef is undergoing yet another bleaching |
| 0:41.0 | event but this time it's back to back with the last one and |
| 0:44.1 | that means bad news for the corals and for the oceans but it's mostly the genetics of |
| 0:48.9 | us humans today in a minute we'll take a look at the genes that we apparently don't need at all. |
| 0:54.0 | You might think that redundancy in our DNA is rare, but it turns out that people live quite happily |
| 0:59.0 | without one of more than 1300 genes. |
| 1:02.0 | First though, many of you will have bought or been given a genetic |
| 1:06.4 | testing kit. They generally cost about 100 quid or so, and they're mostly concerned with genetic |
| 1:11.6 | genealogy, meaning what you can find out about ancestry from your own DNA. |
| 1:16.5 | So you spit in a tube and then you send it off. |
| 1:19.2 | The spit contains cells sloughed off from the inside of your mouth and those cells contain your genome. |
| 1:25.0 | And a few weeks later you get a report back with various bits of your own unique personal genome broken down. |
| 1:31.0 | Of the companies that sell these tests, 23 and me is one of the biggest, |
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