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Company Claims To Have Workable Draft of Human Genome
cybaea writes "The BBC reports that the human genome is now completely mapped. A largely unknown company beat all the others to it. " The company in question isn't Celera, or any of the other companies everyone's been talking about. It's a company called Doubletwist (Get it?) that claims to have a first "working draft" of the genes in question. Details are still sketchy - if you see more, please post links in the story below.
Well, thats the second 'first' mapping of the human genome this year. I think I can safely predict at least 4 more 'first' mappings this year.
Slashdot is running articles that clearly belong on Freshmeat... or something.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
http://www.doubletwist.com/info/pressarticle.jsp;$ sessionid$ALGC3CIAAAVXJWBCHIRAUWY?id=art 120
or just...
http://www.doubletwist.com
"Before the wreck, I never knew how to type with my face."
[pink beam of light]
The private company Doubletwist is a relative newcomer in the genome race and claim to have obtained the first "working draft" of the entire human genome.
Everyone should note that this draft is untested and still in the development stage, please test thoughly, but please do not incorparte this into your clones yet. With all first or alpha drafts this still is under heavey development and may contain bugs and new fearture are being added daily for example:
Three weeks ago, Celera's CEO Craig Venter announced that his company had obtained the entire gene sequence of a human but had not yet assembled it into the correct order. He added that it would only take them a few weeks to complete that task.
Creating clones with misconfigured and out-of-order genes can cause mutation and system crashes. This map is for educational purposes only, USE AT YOUR CLONES RISK!!!!
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
I went to DoubleTwist's page and had a look at the press release. What they did was use several Sun machines and some proprietary analysis technique to annotate the 80% of the genome already sequenced by the HGP. That means that they took the sequence that the Human Genome Project has and ran an analysis on it to try and find out which portions of the genome are actually genes (that is, are actually translated into proteins) and tried to guess their function (based on similarity to known genes in humans or other organisms). I think this is definitely A Good Thing (tm)...but the sequencing race isn't over yet, and, from what I can see, DoubleTwist isn't even part of it.
Hard to say, but since there is over 6,000,000,000 working models, all carring a working genome, perhaps THAT should be considered prior art?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
First, I'd just like to bring up the point (already mentioned by several other posters) that Doubletwist is not performing sequencing--rather, they are annotating information published by the HGP.
Given the speed with which Doubletwist has published this information, it seems to me that most of the annotation must be automated, by algorithms that identify known motifs for things such as coding regions, certain types of regulatory regions, etc..., and by comparisions of sequences to known genes to guess at the functions of these genes. It's doubtful they've done much error-checking by hand, or any research into determining the role of features not comparable to known sequences.
It seems to me that the value of Doubletwist's database is limited. Unless they have some really sophisticated algorithms no one else has, what they are actually offering would be the services of their database maintainers, plus the time that individual researchers save by not having to do the fashion and run the searches themselves.
Doubletwist is sort of a spinoff/evolution of Pangea Systems, Inc. and has been formed to be a ASP for genomic science. Pangea wasn't such an unknown company in the biotech field. What Doubletwist desperately needed right now was a campaign to increase their name recognition. I guess they now got that...
Whether the announced annotations to the known genome sequence data are really worth the hoopla will be known in a few days or weeks when genomics scientists have had a chance to look it over. In the meantime, relax! There will be lots more such announcements in this hotly contested field. It's just like chip wars.
Doscratese said in post 32 "To those of you who don't believe in genome mapping or sequencing, IMHO, this is the only way to go. we're basically reverse engineering humans. well, that's what you do when you have working binaries but no docs, sourcecode or cpu design: you reverse engineer the hell out of it until you find out all of the above (if you can). "
OK, let's look at this as reverse - engineering humans.
Typically in a reverse - engineering scenario, among a *great* number of other things, one does:
1) find and decipher the source code.
2) theorize , hypothesize, and otherwize draw conclusions about what the parts do individually and in relation to one another in order to create the whole.
3) experiment with these parts individually or in new sequences and combinations, eventually creating a new whole
If this article is correct (draw your own conclusions), then we have completed step 1. Now, we will move on to step 2, trying to find the "meaning" and "purpose" behind each chromosome. A good deal of this has already been done, and I know it will be completed "real soon now".
What I'm interested in is step 3: Reassembling and recreating new life. That's a big responsibility.
1)When we create a life form that is missing a few chromosomes - and someone will, to experiment - is that a new species or is that still human?
2)How many new species will be created? At what point will sentient synthetic life be called "human"?
3) If John Q's DNA is taken without his consent and used to create a child, then whose child is it? Who must pay child support? Does the adult child have a right to locate her biological father?
4) When scientists have created new human-like life, who owns the "soul" or "destiny" of that lifeform? The scientist who created it? The lifeform itself? Is it assumed to be subhuman? Will it be regarded as a working animal, regardless of cognitive ability?
And for the religious people out there: How do you think God will respond when Wolfgang Alexander Williams IV, PHD (an old fashioned, "birth" human) is summoned to the pearly gates, and brags that he has patented seven new species under the genus Homo, all of which are his own creation and his own design. Will we hear a deep belly-laugh from the clouds, or something more fierce?