“Did you know that your genome contains about six billion individual building blocks — and that we can now read the order of all those building blocks in about a day and for about $1000? Leaps in technology since the Human Genome Project have enabled remarkable genomics-based advances in medicine, agriculture, forensics, and our understanding of evolution.” — NIH

LifeOmic: What is a fun fact about DNA or genomics that most people don’t know?

Steve Bray, Principal Scientist at LifeOmic: Scientists have now sequenced the oldest human genome ever found! The DNA was extracted from 430,000-year-old samples of fossilized tooth and a thigh bone, found in Spain’s Sima de los Huesos, which translates to “pit of bones.”

Tom Barber, Chief Scientific Officer at LifeOmic: If you stretched the DNA in one of your cells all the way out, it would be about 2 meters long! If you linked together all of the DNA in a human body, it would stretch to the moon and back.

Patricia Celestino Soper, Assistant Clinical Lab Director at LifeOmic and Fellow of ACMG — American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics: From Thompson & Thompson Genetics in Medicine, 8th Ed. (2016), the sequence of nuclear DNA is approximately 99.5% identical between any two unrelated humans! A quote from the textbook: “Every person is likely to receive approximately 75 new mutations in his/her genome from one or the other parent. Most of these mutations are single nucleotide changes in noncoding portions of the genome and will probably have little or no functional significance. Approximately 1 in 200 persons is likely to receive a new mutation in a known disease-associated gene from one or the other parent.”