THANKS to the shenanigans in Florida, 2000 will always be synonymous with
political farce. But it will also be remembered as the year something rather
more fundamental captured the world’s imagination: the human genome.
Bill Clinton hailed that very long sequence of four different letters, each
representing a nucleotide base, as “the most wondrous map ever produced” when he
unveiled it on 26 June. The media lapped it up, casting the “book of life” as a
genetic oracle heralding undreamed-of treatments for incurable diseases.
But as New Scientist said at the time, this was just “the end of the
beginning”. What was announced in June was really a working draft. True, it did
stretch from end to end of each human chromosome, but it sported gaping holes
that are still being feverishly plugged in sequencing labs across the globe.
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Just before Christmas, a third of the genome will have been completed to the
“gold standard” prescribed by the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO), the
coordinating body of the publicly funded global consortium sequencing the
genome. You’ll be able to see it free on the Net, and next year you may be able
to look at a rival “private” version produced by Celera Genomics of Rockville,
Maryland, the brainchild of maverick scientist Craig Venter.
Since HUGO and Celera shared the honours in June, both organisations have
ploughed on independently with new projects to decipher human DNA. Both also
plan to sequence the mouse, an animal whose DNA is strikingly similar to our own
and will provide a Rosetta Stone for understanding our genes. “Researchers can
mimic in mice the effect of DNA alterations which occur in human diseases, and
then study the consequences of those DNA misspellings,” says Jane Peterson,
director of sequencing at the US National Human Genome Research Institute.
Celera has already pinned down 95 per cent of the mouse genome, a project
Paul Gilman, its director of policy, saw as “a very logical next step”. The
publicly funded effort is trailing, but hopes to have rough drafts of the mouse
genome by the late spring.
The Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Centre, a HUGO sequencing lab near Cambridge,
will also be sequencing the genome of the zebrafish—a mere half the size
of the human version. The fish is key to studies of how animals develop because
it’s transparent. “You can see inside them, and they grow fast,” says Richard
Durbin, deputy director of the centre.
By the end of next year, Durbin says that human chromosomes 7, 14, 20 and the
male Y chromosome will be finished, to add to chromosomes 21 and 22, which were
completed in 2000. But 2003 will be the big one: the year when all the gaps will
finally be filled.