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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."
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...
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?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
They interviewed him on NPR yesterday and I thought he said he'd only gotten about 80% of the genome actually mapped.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
Repeal the DMCA!
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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
g e. spl
>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.