Project offers free mouse sequence

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v407/n6805/full/407663b0_fs.html

Nature 407, 663 - 664 (2000) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

October 13, 2000

PAUL SMAGLIK AND ALISON ABBOTT

[PHILADELPHIA MUNICH] Researchers will get a free version of the mouse genome about two

years earlier than planned, thanks to a public-private

collaboration announced last week. A consortium

will pump $58 million into the project — enough to

sequence the organism three times over by April.

Celera Genomics, of Rockville, Maryland, will finish

its mouse project next month, but the information will

be available only to subscribers. In supporting the

public project, rather than paying to use Celera's

databases, the consortium's biggest pharmaceutical

sponsors, Merck and SmithKline Beecham, have

committed themselves to making what their

spokespersons call "precompetitive information"

freely available.

The companies have each given $6.5 million to the public effort. Other sponsors include

Affymetrix, the US National Institutes of Health and Britain's Wellcome Trust.

In announcing the consortium last week at a meeting of the American Society of Human

Genetics, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute,

emphasized that the project is not competing with Celera, in contrast to the portrayal of their

sequencing efforts of the human genome. "This is not a race," he said.

The mouse sequence will make it easier to understand the human genome, as the two share

many genes — although not the repetitive stretches of 'junk' DNA that make up a significant

part of each.

The two mouse projects use different strategies. Celera is sequencing three different strains of

mouse once each, whereas the public effort is sequencing the common 'black six' strain three

times.

Celera's effort will allow subscribers to detect subtle differences between strains; the public

project will give a more complete view of one strain.

But Celera president Craig Venter sees duplication, not difference. The consortium's effort is a

"waste of public money", he says. "It would make more sense for scientists to pay for Celera

licences than to pay for the genome to be sequenced again."

Roger Schultz, assistant professor of human growth and development at the University of

Texas Southwestern Medical Center, sees merit in the public approach, which aims to

sequence both mouse and human genomes several times more than Celera intends.

"Personally, I'm more interested in the high-quality human product, although a good mouse

project can help you find highly conserved regions, and therefore genes," he says. The Texas

centre is one Celera's several academic subscribers.

Celera subscribers will get the first view of the mouse, as the company expects to finish

sequencing next month. If the public project finishes its first phase in March, as planned, the

data could be largely assembled by the end of next year. Plans announced by the Human

Genome Project last autumn called for a draft of the mouse by the end of 2003, to be fully

completed by the end of 2005.

The Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Washington University

in St Louis, and the British Sanger Centre near Cambridge will do the bulk of the public

project's shotgun sequencing. Washington University is halfway through building a map of the

mouse that will help in assembling a rough draft from the mouse shotgun data.

http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/NEWS/MouseGenes/mouse_release.html