DECIPHERING the mouse genome is the latest stakes in a race between public and private sector research teams to announce the results of their work.
Leaders of the public sector project, under the aegis of the National Human Genome Research Institute, announced late Monday ”a landmark advance” as it released into the public domain a 96% complete mouse genome sequence which should be completed in three years.
The researchers made no mention of the fact that a year earlier, another team, financed by the US-based Celera Genomics and at the time directed by its founder, Craig Venter, had announced that it had decoded 99% of the mouse genome.
The omission, contrary to the conventional rules of the scientific community, reflects the rivalry between the teams that several years ago launched parallel projects to decode mouse and human genomes.
Celera began to sequence the mouse genome in April 2000, using the same method used to decode the human genome — taking all the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of the animal, cutting it up randomly and reassembling the puzzle with the help of powerful computers.
The public sector project, whose financing comes in part from the private sector, is keeping up with Celera, which a year ago supplied scientists, for a fee, with human and mouse DNA sequences for use in research on illnesses from cancer to auto-immune diseases.
”Having this advanced draft of the mouse sequence will greatly accelerate precise identification of the genetic contributors to those illnesses, leading to better understanding of human disease and improved tests and treatments,” said a communiqué of the National Institutes of Health, of which the National Human Genome Research Institute is a part.
As mammals, mice and humans have only recently diverged on the evolutionary tree, and 90% of their genes are identical.
”The mouse sequence provides a very important chapter from evolution’s lab notebook,” said Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead/MIT Centre for Genome Research, one of three public-sector institutes behind the project, along with Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, England.
”Being able to read evolution’s notebook and compare genomic information across species will allow us to glean important information about ourselves,” Lander said.
The mouse genome includes 20 pairs of chromosomes and, current results suggest, about 2,7-billion base pairs, or 15% less than the human genome, which has 23 chromosome pairs and 3,1-billion base pairs, according to the public sector researchers.
The comparison of the two genetic sequences indicates an equivalent number of genes in mouse and man, totalling about 30 000.
Decoding the mouse genome is an integral part of the race to sequence the human genome, whose financial and scientific repercussions are not the only things at play: a Nobel prize hangs in the balance.
In March, three members of the public sector team authored an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which they accused the private sector team of having used data from the public sector research in the human genome sequence, an accusation that was rejected by Venter.
The Swedish Nobel committee, known for its prudence, could wait until the controversy settles before placing the human genome project on the list of its prizes. – Sapa-AFP