By Jessa Netting and Linda Wang
Come one, come all. The newly completed sequence of the human genome is now on parade for the whole world to see. Like a display of the storybook emperor’s new clothes, however, our genome’s finery may be as striking for what we don’t see as for what we do.
After the past few months of analysis at breakneck speed, two genome-mapping projects, one public and one private, have each pieced together the genetic fabric revealing the order of all the genes on our chromosomes. The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, a collective of several academic and government labs, and its rival in the private sector, Celera Genomics of Rockville, Md., published the sequences this week in the Feb. 15 Nature and Feb. 16 Science, respectively.
“I think that this is a race with no losers,” says Celera president, J. Craig Venter. “We were climbing a mountain to see what was on the other side.” Now, with the entire human genetic ensemble on view, scientists are poring over it in search of hints about evolutionary history, physiology, and disease vulnerability.
The two lynchpin papers in Science and Nature were accompanied by a total of 31 articles discussing implications of the data reported by the two groups and reporting early, independent explorations of the completed 3-billion-subunit sequence. The genome is built from permutations of four different chemical components, known as nucleotides.