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Biotech / Medical : Celera Genomics (CRA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bob zagorin who wrote (481)	6/26/2000 8:59:00 PM
From: Walkingshadow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 746

bob, <<< "And I think they will blow people away with the speed at which they sequence proteins and other more commercial inf. once they turn those big PE analyzers toward those tasks." >>> I think they already have: with I believe about 50 people, they sequenced the human genome in 10 months, something the HGP---with at least 3,000 people---has worked on for 10 years. And---much more importantly---they are getting faster and faster. Super tasks which only months ago took 8 days they are now accomplishing in 5 minutes. And therein lies the key to Celera's real power, and a clear indication of its destiny: arguably the most formidable supercomputing force on the planet, and the talent and ambition necessary to take biology and medicine way over the top into the truly computational stage, where the physical sciences have been for decades. Computational expertise and power have been at least a prerequisite, if not largely responsible for, the quantum leaps in the physical sciences during the last two decades. Given that these quantum leaps in the physical sciences have spawned the enormous technological and telecommunications advances which have been the primary driving force for the greatest bull market in our history, it seems only reasonable to anticipate no less now in the biological and medical sciences. This, from the Celera announcement: "The calculation to perform the assembly involved 500 million trillion base to base comparisons requiring over 20,000 CPU (central processor unit) hours on Celera's supercomputer. This is believed to be the largest computational biology calculation to date." Better staple your socks to your legs so they don't get blown off. It's not the 300 PEB analyzers running flat-out 24/7, it's the Compaq AlphServer supers, the brand-new Wildfire, all that massively parallel processing capacity (1200 microprocessors at last count), not to mention 64 Gb of memory. And, exceedingly talented, driven, and ambitious personnel. With the acquisition of Paracel, and the hiring of a prominent super expert, and algorithms and software, it is clear to me that CRA is developing---uh, make that detonating---into a company in which sequencing will be a mere sideline operation. Maybe they'll even outsource sequencing to the NIH and the 3,000 Human Genome Project collaborators, after suitable technological upgrades and extensive inservicing of course......;-) As always, JMVHO...... Walkingshadow

To: bob zagorin who wrote (481)	7/9/2000 9:07:55 AM
From: Biotech Jim	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 746

Bob- I have been doing further DD on the genomics companies, and there is no doubt in my mind that CRA is THE genome sequencing powerhouse. Their work on melanogaster was outstanding, as well as their jamborees for drosophila genome encoded genes annotation efforts. But, I do have a question concerning their human genome work. Due to the high ratio of intron to exon sequences in the human genome, I wonder how good are the exon prediction alogorithms that CRA uses. I am led to believe that this technology throughout the public sector, private sector and in academia is not sufficient for the task at hand. Do you (or others) have any thoughts on this? Do you suspect that this is why the HHMI granted membership to Phil Green into this esteemed community, to improve on the current algorithms? Disclosure: I am neither long or short CRA or INCY at the present time. BJ