NurseWeek

Two scientific teams develop draft of human genome

Reuters Health
July 2, 2000


	You've read the article. Now tell us what you think. Human Genome Project Celera Genomics National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute

Washington. Celera Genomics announced June 26 that it has completed the first working draft of the human genome, having sequenced 99 percent of the genome using its once controversial "shotgun" approach.

During a joint press conference, the Human Genome Project public consortium said that it has assembled sequences covering 85 percent of the genome and has cloned 97 percent of the genome. "Almost half of the genome is in finished or near-finished form," said Francis Collins, MD, Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute.

The gaps in Celera’s 99 percent sequenced genome "don’t add up to much," Celera’s president and chief scientific officer J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., said at the conference. "We have 3.12 billion letters of the genetic code that have been assembled," he added.

"We will see coming out of this the blossoming of the field of pharmacogenomics," Collins said. The data will generate "thousands of new drug targets, which will turn out to be the source of blockbuster treatments in the future," he added.

In a White House press conference last week, President Clinton stressed the importance of "public-private cooperation" in maximizing the potential of genetic research.

"Public and private research teams are committed to publishing their genomic data simultaneously later this year, for the benefit of researchers in every corner of the globe," Clinton said. "And after publication, both sets of teams will join together for an historic sequence analysis conference. Together, they will examine what scientific insights have been gleaned from both efforts, and how we can most judiciously proceed toward the next majestic horizons."