When biotech firm Celera was attacked for its cockiness in vowing to
sequence the human genome before university and government scientists
did, the company had a powerful comeback: hey, we sequenced the fruit
fly first, remember? Last year Celera and UC, Berkeley, finished
sequencing the chemical "letters" (A's, T's, C's and G's) in the DNA of Drosophila.
But when mathematician Samuel Karlin of Stanford University compared
Celera's sequences with those worked out and corroborated in
experiments, he found "significant discrepancies," he reports in Nature:
45 percent of the fly genes contained serious errors (like letters in
the wrong place). Celera admits its sequence "is still a work in
progress." And the human genome, which the public project and Celera
were hellbent on finishing by this spring? It, too, may contain
substantial errors. Oops. |