Question: how do you look into people's genes?

Darren Logan answered on 13 Mar 2012:

There are two parts to this. Firstly we collect DNA from the person. This can be be done by taking some blodd, or saliva. Then we extract the DNA (which involves breaking up the cells and proteins, leaving DNA behind). When then break the DNA into lost of tiny bits and use a fancy machine to read inwards from both ends of the DNA fragments.

This gives us millions and millions of tiny DNA “reads” each around 100 bases long. You can consider bases like letters: A,G,T or C and each read is like a 100 letter word made up of these letters in different combinations.

Because each of these reads will overlap with another one, we then use powerful computers to put them together like a jigsaw. The end result is one loooong string of about 3 billion letters then make up the sequence of our DNA. Once we have that, we can look for certain combinations of letters that tells use where the genes are in the sequence and check whether they code for properly functioning genes, or genes that may have a problem. So as you can see, a lot of gene research these days is computer based. So if you want to be a geneticist, its a really good idea to make sure you have good computer skills.

If you want to look through a genome yourself you can do so using this website: http://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Location/Genome