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Download The Human Genome

Posted by Roblimo on from the ultimate-in-do-it-yourself dept.

CMU_Nort writes: "The San Francisco Gate has a story about the completion of the human genome project. Apparently the University of California at Santa Cruz has put the Genome online for downloading here. I don't know about you, but I think this sort of sharing is very cool. We finally have the source for human beings. Now if only they'd GPL it."

2 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Contig Assembly -- a mere hack isn't enough by Jonathan · · Score: 5

    Although the article doesn't really explain it, what this programmer did was write a contig assembly program -- a program that tries to find the most likely ordering of the fragments in the raw sequence data.

    While it is very impressive that a programmer was able to write a contig assembly program in four weeks, and that it only took three days to assemble the entire genome, I really doubt that this particular assembly of the genome is going to be definitive. People like Gene Meyers and Phil Green have devoted years to developing such programs, and I think the results of their programs, although probably taking more than three days to run, are likely to yield more accurate results.

  2. Re:Compression by Jonathan · · Score: 5

    Actually, DNA compression is a topic of interest, not only from the standpoint of saving disk space, but also for analyzing the sequence -- areas that compress differently may have different functional roles. You can read a paper on the subject by some people I know here