The world leading genomic infrastructure that the UK has developed has placed it at the head of genomic data capacity and research internationally. Here, genomics is becoming a fundamental tool in our understanding of health and the progression of disease. The major focus of scientific research so far has been on health and disease, where we have made remarkable progress for some conditions. However, the effects that genes have on different traits is a very complicated puzzle each of us has around 20,000 genes which operate in complex networks to influence our traits. Large scale scientific studies have improved our understanding of how specific sections of DNA – genes – relate to some of our traits and characteristics. This technological advance in sequencing presents a step change in our ability to understand the human genome. Now, sequencing a whole human genome can be completed in a single day. The first genome took 13 years to sequence, meaning that many scientific studies were able to look at only specific sections of DNA.

Since then, the technologies with which we can read the human genome have developed at a rapid pace. Finally, we could read nature’s genetic blueprint. The sequencing of the human genome at the turn of the millennium was a critical point in our understanding of human biology. With the structure of DNA finally understood, it was a further 50 years until the full human genome was sequenced in 2003 by the Human Genome Project. A century of gradual discoveries allowed James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins to deduce the now famous ‘double-helix’ model in 1953, two bonded chains that coil around each other. DNA, the foundation of all biological life, was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher.

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