Biology: Advances in genetics

Methods that people have used to develop new organisms with desirable traits are:

• Selective breeding
              selecting a few organisms with desired traits to serve as parents of the next generation.
• Inbreeding
              crossing two individuals that have identical or similar sets of alleles. The new organisms are very similar to those of their parents.
• Hybridization
              crossing two genetically different individuals. The hybrid organism that results is bred  to have the best traits from both parents.
• Cloning
             a clone is an organism that is genetically identical to the original organism it was produced from. A clone  has exactly the the same genes as the parent organism.
• Genetic Engineering
             in this  process genes from one organism are transferred into the DNA of another organism.

Dolly, the first cloned sheep.
Source: Daily Mail

The Human Genome Project:
A genome is all the DNA in one cell of an organism.
The main goal of the Human Genome Project is to identify the DNA sequence of every gene in the human genome.