Sir

We should like to correct a statement in your Briefing on malaria about funding for the sequencing of the genome of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum (Nature 386, 535; 540; 1997).

You report that the US Department of Defense, the US Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the UK Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have created a fund for this sequencing effort. In fact, no ‘fund’ has been established and there has been no pooling of funds among the donors. However, an exciting international consortium of scientists and funding agencies has been formed during the past year to provide the funds and reagents required to sequence the P. falciparum genome, and to produce, annotate and publish these sequences.

We estimate that it will cost a minimum of $15 million to complete and annotate the 30-megabase P. falciparum genome. In the initial pilot phase, funding has been used to develop methods and to produce the reagents required for the high-throughput sequencing and for annotating the sequences. As a result of progress so far, the plan is to sequence the 14 chromosomes separately and to divide the work by chromosome, with about half the work being done in the United States and half in England. The work in the United States has initially been supported by grants from the NIH and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and in England by the Wellcome Trust. Subsequent support will also be provided by the US Department of Defense. In the United States, the Naval Medical Research Institute is providing P. falciparum DNA and chromosomes, the Institute for Genomic Research will be doing a significant amount of the high-throughput sequencing and Stanford University is committed to sequencing at least one of the larger chromosomes.

The donors are also supporting research on clone stability, library construction and optimization of sequencing reagents for the project at these three institutions, and at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Harvard University. In England, the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford is providing P. falciparum reagents, and sequencing is being done at the Sanger Centre at Cambridge. It is expected that during the next few years a number of other laboratories may participate in the effort.

The participants (scientists and donors) involved in this collaborative undertaking coordinate their activities through conference calls, e-mails and meetings. The researchers and funders met in Baltimore, Maryland, in December 1996 and will meet in Cambridge, England, on 16-17 June 1997. In addition, there has been an effort to involve the broader malaria community in this project and to facilitate widespread dissemination of the genomic information.

There are substantial scientific obstacles to be overcome before the sequence of the P. falciparum genome is fully elucidated. Nonetheless, during the past year we have made great strides in identifying the funds required to pursue the project, building a strong group of scientists and institutions to execute the science, and establishing a collaborative network of scientists and donors. We believe that this project will provide a road map for malaria research in the twenty-first century, research that will lead to improved treatment and prevention of a parasitic infection that causes hundreds of millions of illnesses, and millions of deaths annually.