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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."
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.
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.
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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=5
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).
>Shadow's (Craig Venter's dog) sequence being released
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>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/CMRHomePa
122 completed genomes to date.
Be thankful when your wrinkly old immune compromised butt needs some help in the hospital in a few years.