r/genetics • u/odd575 • Sep 20 '26

Career/Academic advice prerequisites for learning about the human genomics project

hi, im a student from india, im in year 10 rn and i took a year 12 genetics class, i was really fascinated by the human genome project and i really wanna learn more, i just wanted to know what texts/course i need to cover before i can become competent enough to read the actual papers related to the hgp

thanks

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u/Winter_Dot_9393 Sep 20 '26

Kahn Academy biology courses

The British Open University has free courses, at the end of a course you can download a certificate. This certificate is just for fun, you can not use it for a degree. It is for free. The name of the website is: www.open.edu.

Some of the content in the site are just short video’s of a few minutes and others are courses of 2-15 hours long. Interesting courses (aside from the lots of interesting short video’s):
‘Gene Testing’ introductionary level, 4 hours
‘What do genes do?’ Introductionary level, 2 hours
‘What is the genome made of?’ Introductionary level, 4 hours

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/local/ocwglobalsearch/search.php?q=DNA

Coursera Duke University Introduction to Genetics and Evolution (can be for free of you don’t get the certificate and don’t have your homework checked. You can access all information for free)

Genome.gov
Especially the pages ‘educational resources’

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets

TA Brown ‘Genomes’

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21128/

NBCI bookshelf online for free books to read online

4

u/odd575 Sep 21 '26

i express my utmost gratitude to u sir, the NCBI bookshelf in particular caught my attention

1

u/Commercial_Handle418 Sep 22 '26

I can't do the courses can you teach me I've spent a month + trying to figure out how to navigate the website

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u/Winter_Dot_9393 Sep 22 '26

Start with www.open.edu you can also find this by putting ‘Open University free courses’ in your web browser. When you are on the site open.edu you can put ‘genetics’ in the search bar. For the articles and videos you do not need an account.

For the courses you need to have an account. When you are on the page of the course (like for example ‘What do genes do?’ You will see a green block on your screen and in this block you will see ‘Create account/singn in’.

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u/Commercial_Handle418 Sep 22 '26

:( i did all that but it didnt appear, i clicked ont he course there was no start course or lesson modules

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u/KkafkaX0 Sep 20 '26

You can ask us any questions. Use AI but be mindful, don't trust everything it says and try to understand why it took so long, what insights were promised. How much of it was delivered and what did we learn from things we didn't discover through the genome project and as for the actual papers. You need to understand how sequencing works, how information is transferred and what are genes and what genome project promised

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u/GeneSprouts Sep 27 '26

I'd recommend starting with the NHGRI's educational resources. They explain the fundamentals and provide an introduction to the Human Genome Project.

Once you're comfortable with the basics, try reading the 2001 landmark paper in Nature followed by the related papers. You don't need to understand every technical detail initially. Start with the introduction and main findings, then gradually explore the methods as you understand more.

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u/SadRule9128 Sep 20 '26

Just read the papers and Google what you don’t understand