See the answer on our Medicine and the New Genetics Web page. See the answer on our Gene Therapy Web page. See the answer on our Pharmacogenomics Web page. See the answer on our Genetic Counseling Web page. A genome is all the DNA in an organism, including its genes.
Genes carry information for making all the proteins required by all organisms.
These proteins determine, among other things, how the organism looks, how well its body metabolizes food or fights infection, and sometimes even how it behaves. The human genome, for example, has 3 billion pairs of bases. Ts, Cs, and Gs is extremely important. The order underlies all of life's diversity, even dictating whether an organism is human or another species such as yeast, rice, or fruit fly, all of which have their own genomes and are themselves the focus of genome projects. Because all organisms are related through similarities in DNA sequences, insights gained from nonhuman genomes often lead to new knowledge about human biology.