Title:
Why African scientists are studying the genes of African species, and how they do it
Authors:
Anne Muigai
Professor of Genetics, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology
Appolinaire Djikeng
Professor, University of Edinburgh
ThankGod Echezona Ebenezer
Bioinformatician, European Bioinformatics Institute
Published:
The Conversation, 19 April 2022
From the article:
DNA is the blueprint of life. All the information that an organism needs to survive, reproduce, adapt to environments or survive a disease is in its DNA.
That’s why genomics – studying DNA and genes – is so important. It involves sequencing species’ parts or the entire genome. This is a scientific method to determine an organism’s DNA by breaking these components into fragments and determining their compositions or sequences. The fragments are then aligned and merged to reconstruct the original sequence.