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Most of Woolly Mammoth Genome Reconstructed
geekmansworld writes "From the Washington Post, 'An international team of scientists has reconstructed more than three-quarters of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species.' Who wants a pet mammoth?"
The mammoth mitochondrial genome was decoded a few years ago.
Mito DNA is much easier to sequence from old samples due to the fact that for every cell which contains one copy of the nuclear genome, there are thousands of copies of the mitochondrial genome.
The folks at 454 Life Sciences made reconstructing a genome from lots of little pieces pretty simple by using an algorithm that looks for common fragments (ex AAGGCTTCTA and CTTCTATCTGG probably go together to form AAGGCTTCTATCTGG).
Spoken like one who has never actually tried to assemble a genome sequence. Trust me, there is absolutely nothing simple about it. And while 454 Life Sciences (now a division of Roche Diagnostics) pioneered a new technology for generating raw DNA sequence data they did not pioneer the assembly process. Sequence assembly algorithms are a long and well studied problem.
They also pretty much pioneered modern sequencing techniques.
While 454 was first to the market with a next-generation sequencing platform they are currently in heavy competition with the Illumina/Solexa platform. And then there is Pacific Bioscience due to release a platform in 2010 which could eat both their lunches.