WHO better to kick off the meeting in Birmingham last weekend than the
controversial genome entrepreneur Craig Venter? Barely three weeks after sharing
the glory for sequencing the human genome, Venter said his company, Celera
Genomics of Rockville, Maryland, is steaming ahead with a number of projects he
believes will give it a head start in the effort to find out what our genes do.
He also went some way towards satisfying widespread curiosity over just whose
DNA Celera has been sequencing at such a furious pace.
Venter predicted that Celera will finish sequencing the mouse genome by the
end of December, providing the comparative data considered vital for unravelling
the human genome. By contrast, the US National Human Genome Research Institute
estimates that it will take publicly funded labs about three years to complete a
draft of the mouse genome.
“Comparative genomics will be the single most important tool for analysing
genomes,” said Venter. By comparing newly discovered human genes with their
known counterparts in other organisms, it should be possible to discover the
functions of these genes. Many researchers and companies around the world are
already busy working out the functions of genes in mice by “knocking out”
specific genes and seeing what happens.
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Venter is already looking beyond the genome sequence to what can be done with
the information it holds. “At best, our gene code will tell us the increased
risk of disease,” he told delegates. “It’s only by understanding protein
function that we can truly understand and predict medical outcomes.” Celera is
investing in “revolutionary” new mass spectrometers, built by PE Biosystems of
Boston, which in a day can automatically work out the sequence of amino acids in
thousands of different proteins.
Initially, Venter and his colleagues will be looking for abnormal proteins
that distinguish cancerous cells from healthy ones, and which might be to blame
for tumours. He hopes these rogue proteins will allow Celera to develop new
tests and perhaps vaccines for cancer. “Vaccines could even be
patient-specific,” he said.
Venter also revealed new details about the three women and two men who
supplied the DNA that Celera sequenced, saying there had been a lot of concern
about ethnicity. Venter stressed that “race is not a scientific concept”, but he
said that the five, based on the individuals’ own descriptions, consisted of two
Caucasians, an Afro-American, a Hispanic and a person of Chinese origin. When
asked if he was one of the five, Venter declined to say. His only comment was:
“Of course, as a scientist, I’d be curious about my own genome.”