Word: dna
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Today those involved in the international consortium take pride in posting their new DNA sequences on the Web within 24 hours of assembly. Twelve years ago, no one could have imagined that nearly 500 million base pairs of assembled DNA would be posted in just one month...
...contrast, the large infusions of private capital over the past two years support companies that aim to find and patent key DNA sequences before they become publicly available. Not surprisingly, the leaders of these companies have implied that those of us who started the project were no longer needed. To our vast relief, the publicly supported effort received not less but more money. Our backers want to ensure that all the essential features of the human genome are available without cost to all the people of the world. The events of the past few weeks have shown that those...
...came, if not to a meeting of the minds, at least to a workable understanding--and a framework for this week's joint announcement. After more than a decade of dreaming, planning and heroic number crunching, both groups have deciphered essentially all the 3.1 billion biochemical "letters" of human DNA, the coded instructions for building and operating a fully functional human...
...fact, is this cherubic-looking, blue-eyed ex-surfer hated by so many colleagues, who have called him everything from a greedy megalomaniac to a Hitler? Forget about easy explanations, such as his outsize ego (yes, one of the samples he is analyzing is rumored to contain his own DNA) or his penchant for doing science by press release (yes, he keeps his door open to reporters) or his tendency to do not science but, as pioneer DNA mapper James Watson sneered, tedious assembly-line labor on machines that "could be run by monkeys" (yes, most of Celera's analysis...
...decoded 100,000 letters (the human genome has some 3.1 billion, spelling out some 50,000 different genes, at the best guess). They were hieroglyphics to him, but not, he knew, to living cells, which recognize active genes and spin off single strands of RNA that mirror the DNA's coding. So Venter collected the new RNA, inserting it into bacterial cells and letting them clone junk-free complementary DNA, or cDNA, matching the original genes. His automatic sequencer could then read the letters of these genetic instructions...