There are 23 pairs of human chromosomes and children get half a set from each parent.

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Gene Payoff Sometime later this year Craig Venter, the grandstanding gene hunter at Celera Genomics, will announce that he has sequenced all 23 pairs of human chromosomes.

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Most normal cells in the human body contain 46 chromosomes, or bundles of genetic code.

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There are 46 chromosomes in a human cell, but he only needed one.

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Traditionally, of course, scientists couldn't take a yardstick to the DNA-containing chromosomes contained in human cells and measure the distance between genes.

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He believes that the GeneEngine will be handling whole chromosomes--every human cell has 23 pairs of them, and each chromosome holds 50 million to almost 300 million letters of DNA--within two years.

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The human cell nucleus contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, which carry genetic information necessary for developing and running the body correctly.

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The last time I checked with biologists, philosophers and even politicians on both sides of the debates about abortion, stem cell research and cloning, they were pretty certain human individuals were defined by two sets of chromosomes (half from the male, half from the female) which were arranged in the one-celled zygote after fertilization.

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Egli is among the handful of scientists who have been working to perfect the technique with human cells and in 2011, succeeded in producing human stem cells, but with double the number of chromosomes.

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Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak are credited with discovering how chromosomes are protected against degradation -- a field that could shed light on human aging and diseases, including cancer.

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