Why African scientists are studying the genes of African species, and how they do it

By 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

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…

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