Thanks to its more than 10-year painstaking efforts, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences has completed the construction of a permanent cellular bank for Chinese. The cellular bank has collected 3,119 permanent cell lines strains and 6,010 DNA samples from 58 ethnic groups, under strict collecting standards and under donors?¯ permission.
China is a country with numerous ethnic groups. Its human genome research activities has made an endeavor to preserve the genomes of different ethnic groups on a permanent basis, study the structural differences between these genomes, analyze their genetic implications, and understand the distributions of major diseases causing genes and vulnerable genes. The efforts will create a theoretical ground for studying the genesis of these diseases and associated genetic therapeutic techniques. It also creates necessary conditions for sharing international findings on human genomes.
While creating the cellular bank, researchers also developed an improved technique to turn B lymphocytes into permanent cells. The research team has made its cell lines and DNA samples available to domestic human genome research institutes. In the area of international cooperation, the project has rendered 149 permanent cell lines to the European Research Center for Human Genome Diversity, and made its DNA samples available for a number of international research institutes. The research team has produced more than a hundred papers, and its research findings has won second prize of the National Natural Science Award in 2005. |
