Word: genbank
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Venter will undoubtedly continue to irritate. He sparked a new controversy just two weeks ago by negotiating an agreement with Science whereby the prestigious journal will publish his genome sequence without insisting that he take the customary parallel step of uploading the data to NIH's GenBank website. Leaders of the competing genome project symbolically chastised Science by taking their own version of the genome to the rival journal Nature. But it's thanks to Venter, aggressive and hard-nosed as he is, that the world can read the score of the human symphony--and those of some 40 other...
Molecular biologists still know so little about the human genome, in fact, that even with some 85% of the sequence published on the HGP's GenBank website for every scientist in the world to see, nobody has even a ballpark figure for how many genes humans have. Before this week, the betting ranged from as few as 28,000 to as many as 140,000. Now it looks more like...
Hidden somewhere in the remaining 98,000 base pairs are instructions that govern how much protein gets churned out--an essential clue for developing eventual treatments for diabetics. But before the public project's data began going up on GenBank, finding the hidden code would have been a daunting task. "To isolate the DNA and do all the sequencing would have taken a highly trained Ph.D. a year or two," says Altshuler, "an ungodly, unacceptable amount of work...
...next step was to look at the same gene in the mouse, taking advantage of the fact that the noncoding portions of the genome in man and mouse are 75% similar. Three weeks after pulling the gene's human sequence off GenBank, Altshuler lined up the mouse and man genes side by side and spotted five regions that were active in both. Now he's going to focus on these five regions as possible targets for drug design, figuring this is where the regulatory action is likely...
Then there are the complaints about the quality of his work. Collins once said that Venter's map would read like Cliffs Notes or Mad magazine. Others call him a cheat for lifting data made public on the government's GenBank website www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov at taxpayers' expense--and then patenting sequences culled from this data, thereby locking up information originally intended to be freely available. (Ironically, Celera suffered a setback when some of the government data turned out to be contaminated with nonhuman sequences...