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| Hinxton,
Monday, 26 June 2004 |
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| Wellcome
Trust announces completion of first draft of Human Genome |
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The world's largest DNA sequencing centres are announcing today the
public release of the draft human genome.
"Simultaneously, a great deal of biological information attached to
this DNA sequence is being made publicly available," says Graham Cameron,
Joint Head of the European Bioinformatics Institute [EBI] in Hinxton,
UK, an Outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL].
Researchers at the EBI and the neighboring Sanger Centre, one of the
world's most productive sources of sequence information from the human
genome, have been searching for genes among the vast amout of information
encoded in the complete genome. This has been achieved through a highly-automated
set of analytic tools called Ensembl.
"The best source to 'get' the human genome is the Ensembl
website," Cameron says, "where researchers will find the most comprehensive
information available about human genes."
The web address of Ensembl
is www.ensembl.org
A genome is the entire sequence of "base pairs" - molecular subunits
that make up an organism's DNA. What researchers primarily hope
to learn from this information is how information encoded in genes
is used to synthesize proteins - the workhorse molecules that carry
out most of the activity in cells. Pinning down the functions of
these molecules is critical in understanding all biological processes
- for example, a single protein may be responsible for permitting
a virus to enter a cell, for the development of a tumor, or for
the devastating effects of genetic diseases.
Scientists have estimated that genes may make up only two per cent
or less of the human genome, however - the rest of the DNA is of
unknown function - so a project like Ensembl is essential even to
identify genes. Ensembl also links gene sequences to whatever information
biologists have already discovered about their functions in cells
and organisms. Researchers have been compiling this information
for decades, but integrating it into databases that are easy to
navigate has been a challenging task. EMBL was one of the first
institutions in the world to recognize the need for such integration,
and the EBI currently manages some of the world's largest databases
for biological information.
The result of the collaboration is a highly-organised public database
that will permit researchers from all over the world to make immediate
use of sequence data. Ensembl will also vastly speed up applications
such as identifying new targets for drug development.
Press Contact
Russ Hodge
EMBL Information and Public Affairs Officer, European
Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse
1, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Tel: +49 [0] 6221 387 452
E-mail: trista.dawson@embl.de |
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