Word: biotechs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Biotech Goes to School...
...newly decoded human genome - one by Craig Venter and his company Celera, one by the publicly funded Human Genome Project - was the end of a long and unprecedented race to unscramble humanity's Book of Life, and supposedly the beginning of new golden age of medical miracles and biotech booms...
...Venter is already accusing his biotech competition of selling access to genes that don't exist. His and the government consortium's tallies both came up with a total number of human genes between 26,000 to 40,000 (a rather fuzzy final answer in its own right), while Incyte Genomics, a Celera competitor, says it's got 120,000. Human Genome Sciences says it has identified 100,000 human genes. DoubleTwist pegs it at 65,000 to 100,000. Affymetrix sells DNA analysis chips with 60,000 genes...
...says what it's got is the number of "messages" sent by genes, not the genes themselves. Their mistake, but maybe their profit too. Because the first consequence inflated numbers mean is that the longstanding "one gene, one protein" tenet of human biology has been thoroughly exploded. And the biotech world just got slapped in the face by a new frontier...
...human genome has only 30,000 genes (about three times as much as a fly, and only 11,000 more than a worm), but "messages" - basically, proteins handcrafted for internal use by the apparently versatile genes - numbering in the hundreds of thousands leads to two conclusions for the biotech field...