Philadelphia & Munich

Mighty mouse: knowing the murine genome will help in understanding human genes. Credit: TEK IMAGE/SPL

Researchers will get a free version of the mouse genome about two years earlier than planned, thanks to a public-private collaboration announced last week. A consortium will pump $58 million into the project — enough to sequence the organism three times over by April.

Celera Genomics, of Rockville, Maryland, will finish its mouse project next month, but the information will be available only to subscribers. In supporting the public project, rather than paying to use Celera's databases, the consortium's biggest pharmaceutical sponsors, Merck and SmithKline Beecham, have committed themselves to making what their spokespersons call “precompetitive information” freely available.

The companies have each given $6.5 million to the public effort. Other sponsors include Affymetrix, the US National Institutes of Health and Britain's Wellcome Trust.

In announcing the consortium last week at a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, emphasized that the project is not competing with Celera, in contrast to the portrayal of their sequencing efforts of the human genome. “This is not a race,” he said.

The mouse sequence will make it easier to understand the human genome, as the two share many genes — although not the repetitive stretches of 'junk' DNA that make up a significant part of each.

The two mouse projects use different strategies. Celera is sequencing three different strains of mouse once each, whereas the public effort is sequencing the common 'black six' strain three times.

Celera's effort will allow subscribers to detect subtle differences between strains; the public project will give a more complete view of one strain.

But Celera president Craig Venter sees duplication, not difference. The consortium's effort is a “waste of public money”, he says. “It would make more sense for scientists to pay for Celera licences than to pay for the genome to be sequenced again.”

Roger Schultz, assistant professor of human growth and development at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, sees merit in the public approach, which aims to sequence both mouse and human genomes several times more than Celera intends.

“Personally, I'm more interested in the high-quality human product, although a good mouse project can help you find highly conserved regions, and therefore genes,” he says. The Texas centre is one Celera's several academic subscribers.

Celera subscribers will get the first view of the mouse, as the company expects to finish sequencing next month. If the public project finishes its first phase in March, as planned, the data could be largely assembled by the end of next year. Plans announced by the Human Genome Project last autumn called for a draft of the mouse by the end of 2003, to be fully completed by the end of 2005.

The Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Washington University in St Louis, and the British Sanger Centre near Cambridge will do the bulk of the public project's shotgun sequencing. Washington University is halfway through building a map of the mouse that will help in assembling a rough draft from the mouse shotgun data.

http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/NEWS/MouseGenes/mouse_release.html