Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Predicting & Identifying Elite Athletes Through Genetic Testing.


Imagine yourself looking at your genetic code to see and find out if you have an advance athletic gene. Well, it can happen. A recent article in USA Today has found a new trend that hit the athletic sport companies. A simple genetic test to determine who has an advantage in becoming a sport athlete. In addition, you are able know what injuries you are prone to and which fitness workouts are best suited for your body physique. So, how does this work? Scientists have been researching genetics for sometime now and discovered that sport and fitness athletes have a few similar genes connected to their athletic performance. A saliva sample is observed to see into an athlete's genetic code and to specifically find if the gene ACTN3, which is linked to a distinct protein to help muscles powerfully contract at high speeds, is in the athlete's genetic code. The companies that look into an athlete's genetic code have claim that these athletes are more likely to be proficient in either power or endurance type of sports like football and soccer. Teams have been using these genetic tests to find out if their athletes has what it takes to be skillful at the sport. However, scientists all over the world are skeptical about this claim and are just simply saying that this genetic discovery doesn't fully determine a person's capability of becoming an elite athlete. Years ago, the Human Genome Project had found that the human genome has about 20,000 genes but only about 200 has been identified to have a correlation with fitness performance. Also, we are not certain that there are only 200 genes associated with fitness, we predict that there could be many more. Dr. Robert Green, a Harvard geneticist, says " The notion that [athletic genetic testing companies] are somehow tailoring recommendations on the basis of your DNA is nonsense". In the end, it is questionable to believe someone's athletic performance through genes but what if the ACTN3 gene is an athlete's key to success?

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