How was the Huntington's disease gene's location found?

Question

I read in the book "Why we get sick." by Nesse and Williams that:> Steady detective work and fabulous luck have enabled geneticists to> pinpoint the Huntington's gene on the short arm of chromosome 4.I want to know what was the "detective" work and the fabulous luck - the whole story of the discovery of the location of the gene.

Answer 1

It was discovered in 1993 by a team at MIT using a technique called exon amplification. The discovery was reported in the March 26 issue of the journal Cell. Here's a summary from the March 31, 1993 article in MIT News: "A gene on a chromosome is naturally divided into several pieces separated by large stretches of DNA known as introns that have nothing to do with the expression of the gene. The MIT tool, known as exon amplification, allows scientists to cull out the pieces of the gene itself from the introns. According to Professor Housman, "such scanning dramatically reduces the amount of work required to search for a [particular] gene."