Word: dna
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...Johns Hopkins Nobelist Hamilton Smith challenged Venter to do more. At the time, Venter was using a technique called shotgunning. In essence, shotgunning amounts to putting DNA into a chemical Cuisinart. High-frequency sound waves shred the long stringy molecule into tiny fragments. The fragments are cloned in bacteria, and then, following what has become standard gene-mapping procedure, the bugs are ripped open and their DNA is run through a gene-sequencing machine...
...because the original DNA has been torn into so many random bits of genetic gibberish (as opposed to the predictable fragments made by gene-cutting enzymes), scientists need powerful computers to determine where the tiny fragments overlap. This is tough enough when you're sequencing a small part of a chromosome. But now Smith urged Venter to try it out, not merely on a strip of DNA but on an entire genome. He proposed Haemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that causes ear infections and meningitis. Until then, only a few small viruses, whose genomes had tens of thousands of genetic letters...
...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...
...fitted perfectly. But as he points out, traditional sequencing leaves holes as well. Like the government's gaps, his can be filled in later--and fast. "Let's say there are 50,000 holes averaging 83 letters each," he says. "At the rate we plan to clone and sequence DNA, we could close those...
...this party, thrown last September, was its guest list: 1,800 of the world's leading genomics experts drawn to Miami by a conference sponsored by Craig Venter, the enfant terrible of the gene hunters. Not everyone in the galaxy of genetics stars was there, however. Conspicuously absent was DNA co-discoverer James Watson, a former head of the federal Human Genome Project, who like other scientists in the field has had a long, troubled relationship with the party's host...