MORE NEWS ABOUT HUMAN GENOMICS [DNA]

The following message was forwarded from someone in the Canadian Health Department. We checked it out and couldn't find anything on their website. They concentrate on diseases.

97% of our DNA or a number similar is like monkeys etc. - not junk DNA. It is recognized and the function mostly known. The other 3% or so is what makes us different form the rest of nature. [J]

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WHOSE GENES ARE THEY, ANYWAY?
by Kristen Philipkoski

 

Jun. 27, 2000 So we've got a genome map, but whose DNA is it anyway?

Is it Craig Venter's? He's the CEO of Celera Genomics, the company that helped lead the race to map the human genome. "There's rampant speculation in the industry that it's Venter's," said Cyrus Harmon, president and CEO of Neomorphic, a genomics company in Berkeley, California. "He's the type of person who would do that."

Because the fruit fly and human genomes are so similar, analysis of the annotated fruit fly genome will also provide a rich source of viable hypotheses about human gene function." However, the gene finding algorithm at the heart of the computing system, Neomorphic's Genie, found 97% of all the known genes in a smaller, well-characterized segment of fruit fly DNA during an experiment held at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Heidelberg, Germany, last September. As reported in the March 24 issue of the journal Science, the total number of genes reported in the Drosophila genome is estimated to be 13,601, which is very close to the predicted number found by Genie.

[Source: note to editors: the following Neomorphic executives are available for interviews by phoning Holly Hartz, Director, External Communications directly at 510-981-8560, or holly@neomorphic.com ]

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