Dog Genome Sequenced

virtualXTC writes "There is an article in Nature today about Shadow's (Craig Venter's dog) sequence being released and freely available to the public (a rare trend in biotech). Craig Venter is generally regarded as the person responsible for getting the human genome sequenced years ahead of schedule using his own DNA and shotgun sequencing approach."

Comments

One wonders

[Kethinov]

if you can get your or your pet's gene sequenced copyrighted. "Hey that guy cloned my prize-winning, one of a kind, best-in-show dog! I'm gonna sue!" I mean damn. If you can copyright one click shopping, shouldn't you be able to copyright gene sequences you own?

Re:One wonders

[Shipud]

Actually, you cannot copyright a gene. Reason: you can only copyright written material, and a gene is not. You can patent a gene (or OneClick), and many companies, and even Universities and other NGO's do that as a matter of rote. You cannot patent a whole genome, as that is too general, but you can work an en-masse system to patent the genes within that genome, as has and is being done for various genomes.

Hulk Poodle

[Bowling Moses]

There's an awful lot of animosity towards Craig Venter, so it's no surprise that around the lab there's been more than one reference towards the genetically modified poodle seen in the Hulk...

No.

[El]

I would suspect that most gene sequences have been around long enough to be in the public domain. And you can't patent them either; God has produced several examples of prior art. Plus, the chances of anyone producing _exactly_ the same gene sequence as your pet are pretty small, unless you allow them to clone it, no?

Re:No.

[BrokenHalo]

the chances of anyone producing _exactly_ the same gene sequence as your pet are pretty small, unless you allow them to clone it, no?

For the record, there is rarely any sequence comparison involved here. The vast majority of the proteins coded for by canine DNA are identical to those in humans. The differences in DNA samples between species are more evident in the non-coding regions (introns), which are rarely sequenced as such, but compared by techniques such as restriction fragmant length or polymerase chain reaction techniques.

Sequence this dog

[wowbagger]

Good, now they can start sequencing this dog's genome....

Warning, bad humour!

[EdMack]

Later on when asked about how accurate certain parts of the sequence were, he replied 'Ruff! Ruff!'. Unsurprisingly nobody laughed.

the whole genome?

[elmegil]

They interviewed him on NPR yesterday and I thought he said he'd only gotten about 80% of the genome actually mapped.

Diamonds

[Deanasc]

Tracy Hall was bitter that his coworkers at GE might get credit for synthesizing diamonds in the donut press so he went out and developed a totally new way to synth Sp3 carbon-carbon bonds in a tetrahedral press. If I was Ventner I'd make sure I found a couple more genomes. Just so everyone knew who the real genius was. After all there's a Nobel Prize out there for someone in the genome business.

Re:Diamonds

[penguin7of9]

After all there's a Nobel Prize out there for someone in the genome business.

I dunno--is there a Nobel Prize out there for the head librarian at the Library of Congress? If you think about it, sequencing genomes is a pretty mechanical process, and pushing it ahead by a few years, like Venter did, is not necessarily such a big deal either.

Re:Diamonds

[liparis]

Venter published the human genome years ahead schedules. I hope the Nobels will remember the sequence he published was full of sequences coming from fly genome, another sequencing project they were doing in parallel.

Re:Diamonds

[penguin7of9]

Venter published the human genome years ahead schedules.

So what? It's still a mechanical process with little scientific insight. If anything, the people who developed the sequencing machines should be rewarded, but even that was more of an engineering feat.

Re:Diamonds

[liparis]

Of course. This was just to say that Venter was not the genius he'd like to be. Publishing data containig errors is _not_ scientific work but money driven research.

Dog genome sequenced?

[Tuxinatorium]

Great, now we're one step closer to cloning Dubya! Won't that be great? With two of him he can cram enough bad grammar into presidential addresses to make every English teacher in the country die of fear. Ah, sweet, sweet, revenge for that oh-so-stupid class.

Re:Dog genome sequenced?

[Anonymous Coward]

say whaaaa?

What about the Penguin Genome?

[G4from128k]

With the the price of sequencing technology falling like a used PC, I wonder when more amateurs will start their own sequencing projects. Seems like the ultimate open source project to me.

Of course with the current penchant for biotech patents, I would not be surprised to discover that I could get jailed on DMCA violations for decoding my own genome.

Re:What about the Penguin Genome?

[Ompaloskeptic]

Yay penguins. And yes. They'd find something to sue you for.

Good Science, Bad Article

[frenchs]

Nature needs to get some writers on their staff that are competent enough to write an article without omissions of important details. Venter's group did not just "sequence" the dog genome. They also annotated it to a certian degree. Annotation is the hard part, and thus this is a newsworthy achievement.

Annotation involves a great deal of wet lab work to actually use the sequences and produce ideas of what parts of the genome produce which protiens. Also, through methods such as ORF finding, CPG islands, Intron/Exon SNERP binding sites, and G/C content, mixed with some statistics, we can computationally detirmine where potential gene sites may lie.

One of the interesting things that Venters group did find is that there are nearly a million SNPs in the dog genome. Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) are responsible for the slight variation that can be found in closely related organisms. An example of this is the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees being due to SNPs which are located in our developmental genes.

Here is a better article on exactly what they did and what the importance of it is.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=57 0&ncid=753&e=4&u=/nm/20030925/sc_nm/science_dog_dc

Re:Good Science, Bad Article

[BrokenHalo]

Well done; a decently informed and informative post on Slashdot. Whatever next?

Academic and Govermental vs. Commerical Sequencing

[frenchs]

Sequencing that is done by the government and academic instutions generall is made availible to the public. I can't find the link right now, but one of the major funding organizations (NSF or NIH.. can't remember). Actually has it in writing that if you come up with a sequence and are funded by them, then you *must* put it in the database. I submitted a story to slashdot a while back about this, so if anyone can find it... be my guest.

Commercial sequencing, unfortunately, is another story. And because commerical science isn't funded by the government, they don't have those contracts that they must abide by. But they are a business, and if company X figures out how to make a protien that will give you a boner (at considerable expense), it is economically advantageous for them to keep that a secret so that company Y can't make boner drugs (piggybacking off the research that company X funded).

Dog Genome

[baz00f]

>Shadow's (Craig Venter's dog) sequence being released
>and freely available to the public (a rare trend in biotech).

"Rare trend", please, you don't know what you're saying. If you want genomes, good genomes, many genomes, and public too, just go to TIGR, courtesy of C. Venter:

http://www.tigr.org/

Better than the dog genome for the sake of our future struggle with microbes is the the "Comprehensive Microbial Resource (CMR) at TIGR:

http://www.tigr.org/tigr-scripts/CMR2/CMRHomePag e. spl

122 completed genomes to date.

Be thankful when your wrinkly old immune compromised butt needs some help in the hospital in a few years.

different view on human genome race

[oever]

Craig Venter is generally regarded as the person responsible for getting the human genome sequenced years ahead of schedule using his own DNA and shotgun sequencing approach.

The book the common thread by John Sulston gives a completely different view on this. Sulston was director of the Sanger Institute which was one of the leading publicly funded sequencing institutes. In the book it is told that the commercial endeavour was nowhere near having the complete genome on its own. Venter needed the publicly sequenced data for assigning the shotgun data. So Venter produced a DNA sequence which consisted mainly from the data obtained with public funds.

In the book there's actually a couple of paragraphs describing that the public institutes were considering publishing their data with a GPL type license. Eventually, they didn't because they felt that, unlike computer code, DNA information should be available to everbody without restrictions on use and distribution.

Dubya?

[BrokenHalo]

You could probably clone his brain by just cultivating a few Yersinia pestis cells...

the rest

[SHEENmaster]

is the intellectual property of Santa Cruz Operations