Thanks Gao, are u the Nature webmaster? Your news is a few hours ahead :). Progress report news tomorrow, not the big one I think.
Dr. Venter spoke to researchers at the
by: rhaydenaia 5/10/00 5:27 pm
Msg: 17191 of 17215
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Read about it in today's Dallas Morning News:
dallasnews.com
Scientists closing in on genetic code
Draft of human genome due in mid-June, researchers say
05/10/2000
By Sue Goetinck Ambrose / The Dallas Morning News
Researchers around the world are closing in on one of the most important achievements in modern science, cataloging the genetic "recipe" for making a human.
An international group of publicly funded researchers said this week that a draft of the genetic recipe, or genome, will be completed in mid-June. And a Maryland biotechnology company that is also cataloging the genome says it has begun to assemble the genome from millions of individual pieces using a powerful computer.
"We hope we're talking about weeks," said Dr. Craig Venter, president of the Maryland company Celera Genomics. "It's going extremely well." Dr. Venter spoke Tuesday to researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Once the computers have finished the assembly and the scientists are confident of the data's quality, a formal announcement will be made.
Scientists have likened the decoding of the human genome to sending a man to the moon. The human genome is written in an estimated 3 billion chemical letters of DNA code. The order of those letters dictates all the genetic instructions that guide life from the moment of conception through adulthood.
While each person has essentially the same genome, subtle differences between people's genomes are part of the reason people have tendencies to develop certain diseases. Knowing all the components of the genome is expected to revolutionize medicine, allowing doctors to tailor health care to their patients' unique genetic makeups and helping pharmaceutical companies create better drugs.
The public effort to catalog the human genome began in 1990, financed by government agencies in the United States and abroad. Celera was established in 1998. Scientists have already finished mapping the genomes of simpler creatures, such as single-celled microbes, a fruit fly and a tiny roundworm.
The government-funded researchers deposit their data in a public database. Celera, by contrast, now keeps its data private and sells subscriptions to its databases.
Dr. Venter said Tuesday that the company plans to publish a scientific article on the genome and make the data freely available on Celera's Web site by the end of the year.
The government-funded "draft" so far represents coverage of about 85 percent of the genome, scientists say, with different portions at varying levels of accuracy. Ultimately, both research teams say, their versions of the genome will have an error rate of 1 in 10,000 DNA letters.
Regarding Dr. Venter's projection of when Celera will complete its genome catalog, one government-funded genome scientist said that by the end of the year, the public effort would also have progressed substantially.
"It'll be just about done," said Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Meanwhile, DoubleTwist Inc., a California biotechnology company, said this week that it has analyzed the human genome data in the public database, searching for individual genes in the sea of DNA letters. The company said it will sell access to the information, which could be useful to pharmaceutical and other biotechnology companies.
Dr. Venter said that as genomes from all branches of life are deciphered, scientists will be humbled.
"Instead of genome scientists getting more and more arrogant with time, we feel stupider," he said. "We realize how little of biology we really understand." |
