Word: celera
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Craig Venter has no shortage of rivals who would love to see him fail--especially among scientists at the Human Genome Project, the multibillion-dollar government-sponsored effort to map every one of our 100,000 genes. When the millionaire molecular geneticist announced in 1998 that his company, Celera Genomics, would do the job in a third of the time at no cost to the taxpayer (thereby making the Genome Project seem like a wasted effort), the scientific community was split into two camps--one group of researchers hoping he could make good on his promise, the other predicting...
...with sweet delight that Venter announced last week that Celera had completed a rough draft of the genome months ahead of schedule and that it was on track to wrap the project up as early as this summer. Celera scientists now have 90% of the genome in their database. They have also captured 97% of all the known human genes and discovered tens of thousands of new ones--including hundreds for previously unknown neurotransmitter receptors and at least one new kind of interferon. "This is not only a monumental moment in Celera's history," Venter proclaimed in a webcast news...
...Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and at the Sanger Centre passed a new milestone by decoding the first animal genome, that of a tiny roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans. At 97 million letters, C. elegans' genome is by far the most sophisticated ever sequenced. But if Venter's newly formed Celera (derived from the word celerity, which means swiftness) can pull it off, his proposal to shotgun the entire 3 billion-letter human genome in three years will make the roundworm's DNA look downright puny...
...only moderate precision by 2001. Says Mark Guyer, an assistant director with the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute: "These data are so rich, it's hard not to extract value from them." But, he admits, "it would not have happened had it not been for the Celera announcement...
...fast as anything running at TIGR. With one of these machines, the 1,000 scientists who had spent 10 years decoding a yeast genome could have completed their work in one day. Emboldened by the new technology, Venter announced his plans to sequence the human genome rapidly. He founded Celera with Perkin-Elmer and promised to publish results freely on a quarterly basis. From now on, Venter said, he was in the information business, selling access to the genomic data he was gathering at breakneck speed...