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Of mice & men's genomes

AFP, Washington
Deciphering the mouse genome is the latest stakes in a race between public and private sector research teams to announce the results of their work.
Leaders of the public sector project, under the aegis of the National Human Genome Research Institute, announced late Monday "a landmark advance" as it released into the public domain a 96-percent complete mouse genome sequence, which should be completed in three years.
The researchers made no mention of the fact that a year earlier, another team, financed by the US-based Celera Genomics and at the time directed by its founder, Craig Venter, had announced that it had decoded 99 percent of the mouse genome.
The omission, contrary to the conventional rules of the scientific
community, reflects the rivalry between the teams that several years ago launched parallel projects to decode mouse and human genomes.
Celera began to sequence the mouse genome in April 2000, using the same method used to decode the human genome -- taking all the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of the animal, cutting it up randomly and reassembling the puzzle with the help of powerful computers.
The public sector project, whose financing comes in part from the private sector, is keeping up with Celera, which a year ago supplied scientists, for a fee, with human and mouse DNA sequences for use in research on illnesses from cancer to auto-immune diseases.
"Having this advanced draft of the mouse sequence will greatly accelerate precise identification of the genetic contributors to those illnesses, leading to better under-
standing of human disease and improved tests and treatments," said a communique of the National Institutes of Health, of which the National Human Genome Research Institute is a part.
As mammals, mice and humans have only recently diverged on the evolutionary tree, and 90 percent of their genes are identical.
"The mouse sequence provides a very important chapter from evolution's lab notebook," said Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research, one of three publicsector institutes behind the project, along with Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, England.
"Being able to read evolution's notebook and compare genomic information across species will allow us to glean important information about ourselves," Lander said.