"Trivial" Error in Celera Fly Genome

Posted by jamie on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @07:55AM from the must-go-faster dept.

In "one of the most petty and ridiculous issues ever in the history of science" - according to the guilty company's chief scientific officer - federal officials noticed that when Celera uploaded genetic sequences of the fruit fly to a public database, there was some human DNA mixed in. It's now been removed, and everyone seems to think this is not a very significant error. But the harsh exchange and defensive posturing on both sides underscores the edgy rivalry between the government group's slow-and-steady approach and Celera's "shotgun" approach to mapping the human genome. This story is also important because mixing human genes into a fly's genes is freaky cool - someone should make a movie about that.

1 of 7 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

It's the less obvious errors that worry scientists by Guppy · 2000-04-27 02:00 · Score: 3

I'm not surprised the error was caught so quickly. One of the first things that was probably done with the Fly data was to run a sequence matching program (Like NCBI BLAST), to compare it to the known portions of the human genome. The sequence matches would stand out, as they would be ~100% identical. That might occasionally happen for very short sequences, but exact matches with any large portions of the human genome would be highly suspicious.

I think the problem here (Besides egos and bad blood) is that some scientists are still suspicious of Celera's motives and methods, and that they wonder if sometime in the future Celera could (whether accidentally or on purpose) release corrupted data that would be much harder to detect.