Interviewee: Ewan Birney. Ewan Birney, one of the leading analysts of the Human Genome Project, takes you on a chromosome tour. (DNAi Location: Genome > Tour > Video: chromosome close-up Part I )

So okay, so you imagine that you're traveling on the genome and right at the start there's this complicated structure right at the start which just effectively stops the DNA falling off the end of the chromosome. That's not quite true, but imagine that, and it's really, I always imagine it as some sort of really complicated regular structure that wraps around. And then suddenly you kick into the real genome and you start marching down there, and a lot of it, if, if you looked at it, it would be like sort of trash basically, you know, bits, shreds of mainly of parasitic genes that have been jumping around our genome awhile ago, and they've kind of got messed around and they make a real mess. So you have to plough through some of this mess. And then you'll hit a gene and in fact if you didn't know, you really wouldn't be able to tell the trash from the gene, but if you're in the know you can say, aha, this is a gene.

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