But Venter, who is on the verge of announcing his own milestone, complete assembly of the genome, questioned the reliability of any gene map produced using public data. CELERA PRESIDENT UNAWAREĬelera President Craig Venter was unaware of DoubleTwist's effort. Although new gene-based drugs will take years to develop and test, the presumption is that the more researchers who focus on the task, the faster some of the hype will pay off. Ultimately, the hope and promise is that gene-hunting efforts will lead to new ways to repair faulty genes that cause or contribute to maladies such as cancer or heart disease. "It was about putting data into the public domain where a variety of people could put it to a variety of uses." "We think this vindicates what the public genome project was about," said Fred Cohen, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco and a member of DoubleTwist's board. "The reason the public project produced all this data was to enable private companies and academics to produce the gene lists that will fuel biomedical research." In essence, the Oakland company has leapfrogged steps one and two, and taken a first pass at separating the genes from the junk in the 85 percent of the raw genome data that is already public.Įric Lander, a senior official of the public genome project, praised DoubleTwist's accomplishment. DOUBLETWIST SECRETLY ENTERSĭoubleTwist secretly entered the race in August, and accelerated its effort this spring by getting Sun Microsystems to help it build a supercomputer network. The rest of the letters are called junk DNA. Understanding that code is a three-step process of reading the raw letters, putting them in order and picking out the genes.įinding genes in the genome's alphabet soup is complicated by the fact that only 3 to 5 percent of those 3 billion letters are thought to encode genes. ![]() The genome is 3 billion chemical letters - A, T, G and C - arranged in a complex code. At stake is the ability to claim credit for a landmark scientific achievement. The various players are jockeying for position in advance of an influential conference of genome scientists that will begin Thursday at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. ![]() At the same time, the public genome project is expected to say that it is nearing completion on its own rough draft of 90 percent of the human genetic code. Celera is expected to announce any day that it has completely deciphered the 3 billion-letter genome from end to end.
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