Word: doubletwist
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...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...
...DoubleTwist's achievement reminds us that sequencing the human genome isn't the same as understanding it. What Celera and the federal project have been doing is figuring out the order of the DNA's chemical constituents--some 3 billion molecular "letters" that spell out the instructions for constructing a functioning human being...
...estimated 95% of those letters fall into the category of "junk DNA"--molecular gobbledygook that spells nothing at all. Discovering where the actual genes begin and end, therefore, is key to understanding their functions--and DoubleTwist has taken a step in that direction. Using a Sun Microsystems supercomputer, the company has taken raw data downloaded from the public project's growing online database and put them through a computational wringer...
...result: a kind of road map to the genome, showing where along its long spirals of DNA the genes are located--65,000 of them with reasonable confidence, an additional 40,000 tagged more tentatively. For $10,000 a year, subscribers to DoubleTwist's website can read portions of the map; for $650,000 they can download the whole thing. And while the information is less detailed and thus less useful than what the gene sequencers will ultimately provide, DoubleTwist managed to get there first...
...DoubleTwist's coup shows that the genome project could generate profits even before it's finished, the mapping of chromosome 21 illustrates the converse: completion of the project won't mean scientists understand genetic diseases...