Genomics revolutionizes medicine and science, but the existing approaches still cannot fully cover the whole variety of human genetic variability. Panogenom, including DNA of many people, can be a solution to this problem, and The new project believes that quantum computers will play a key role in their creation and analysis.
In 2001, when the first reference genome was published as part of the “Human Gene” project, it was based only on the DNA of several donors. Less than one percent of our DNA varies from person to person, but this can still leave important gaps and limit what can be extracted from genomic analysis.
For this reason, the concept of a panogenes is becoming more and more popular. A panogen is a set of genomic sequences from many different people united for covering a much wider range of human genetic variations.
However, collecting such pan-Xs is not easy, and their size and complexity make a computing analysis based on their basis extremely laborious. That is why the University of Cambridge, the Sanger Institute and the European Institute of Bioinformatics have combined efforts to find out if quantum computers can help in this matter.
“We have just begun to study both quantum calculations and a panogentomics,” David Holland from the Sanger Institute said. “Therefore, uniting these two worlds. We do not know for sure what this will lead to, but we see great opportunities for large discoveries.”
Panogenoms can become key to detect how different genetic options affect the biology of a person or other species. The actual reference genome is used as a guide for assembling genetic sequences, but due to the variability of human genomes, significant DNA fragments are often left, which simply do not correspond to this support sequence. Pannogen can cover a much greater genetic diversity, facilitating the binding of disparate elements and giving a more complete idea of the possible variations of the human genome.
Despite their power, the pannogenomas are difficult to work with. While the genome of one person is only a linear sequence of genetic data, a panogen is a complex network trying to cover all the ways in which its components of the genomes coincide and differ with each other.
These so-called “sequences columns” are difficult to build and analyze. And to use the rich representation of the human diversity enclosed in them,