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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."
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