san francisco

The US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, a programme combining genomic research at three national laboratories, is to set up a high-throughput DNA-sequencing factory.

The factory, a joint effort by the Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley and Los Alamos national laboratories, will be based in Walnut Creek, California, in the San Francisco Bay area. It represents a commitment to increase the three laboratories' screening capacity and so create a major contributor to the worldwide effort to sequence the human genome by the year 2005.

About 200 technicians and researchers will work three shifts around the clock, employing state-of-the-art robotics. Technology development and other research will continue at each laboratory. “The purpose is to [make sequencing] highly efficient and very cheap,” says Elbert Branscomb, scientific director of the Joint Genome Institute.

The Department of Energy was the first federal agency to fund an initiative to unravel the entire genome. The impetus for this move grew out of its interest in detecting rare genetic changes that may result from exposure to toxic or radioactive substances. Until now, however, the national laboratories have lagged behind other major sequencing laboratories.

By the end of the current fiscal year in September, the three laboratories are likely to have contributed only about 3 million bases to the public databases, out of a total of 3 billion bases in the human genome. They hope, however, to increase that figure to 20 million by the end of next year, comparable to the most productive laboratories in the country.

The Joint Genome Institute, founded last year, represents a radical change in the laboratories' way of working, says Branscomb, with a shift from competition to collaboration between them. “The essence is breaking down the barriers between the labs,” he says.

Historically, biological research programmes at the laboratories have been small compared with the applied physics and chemistry on which they built their reputations. The Joint Genome Institute has requested $40 million for programmes next year at the three laboratories and the sequencing factory, a $10 million increase on the current fiscal year.

Branscomb says that the sequencing factory will adhere to stringent public disclosure procedures on its work, with immediate postings on the web regarding smaller pieces, and full clones submitted nightly to the public databases.