The Circle of Genomes

Biology has increasingly become an information science, and the complexity of information is on the rise. Ten years ago, the genome sequence of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, sequenced by TIGR, led by Craig Venter, in a then audacious move, cut sequencing costs by half (50 cents a base) and developed technology and drove the project along with computational biologists. It took 13 months for the sequencing alone and 30 hours for the TIGR Assembler software to assemble the 24,000 DNA fragments . Another genome, that of Mycoplasma genitalium, the smallest bacterial genome, was produced in 8 months. These were remarkable achievements of that time, and gave impetus to the thought process of completing the human genome itself, which was eventually published in the year 2001, in a dramatic neck to neck race between the public consortium and Celera Genomics. (publications in Nature and Science)I remember very well the feverish excitement among scientists om the subject of the human genome and its implications. It was everywhere, it was inescapable, and it was breathtaking. How Celera was going to charge for access to the annotation of the genome was widely publicized and how the talk of every search which a researcher made in their database would be monitored for scientific leverage was a concern that was shared by the cautious. But its hard to say how much of this was well founded and how much leverage ( if any ) did Celera's scientists gain. An explosion of public and private databases on the human genome has flourished since then, and the boom that was loud and resounding then has somewhat fizzled out, as increasingly we found that the sequence was not the answer to all questions. This however, does not lessen the importance of the sequence, which is a prime example of one the most invaluable biological resources produced by a world wide collaborative scientific effort. It has taught us many things, importantly, an appreciation of scale in biology.However, sequencing efforts are getting better, to put it mildly. A latest publication in Nature demonstrates a brand new method of sequencing - pyrosequencing. The developers, in order to show the effectiveness of the approach, chose the historic Mycoplasma genitalium (originally sequenced by TIGR in 8 months) and finished the sequencing (96% coverage, 99.96% accuracy) in a single 4 hour run. Breathtaking you say ? And what is the next goal ? What do you think ?