Celera defends human sequence

The publication this week (February 17) of an assessment of the quality, accuracy, and completeness of the human genome sequence produced by Celera in 2001 could reignite the controversy over the validity and independence of the data.

The article in the February 17 PNAS by Sorin Istrail and colleagues at Applied Biosystems in Rockville, Md., is in response to two papers published by members of the Human Genome Project (HGP)—the publicly funded collaboration that simultaneously sequenced the genome (PNAS, 101:1916-1921, February 17, 2004).

“We hope it puts to rest, once and for all, all this whining that's been going on that the genome could not be assembled without the public data,” J. Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics and coauthor of the paper, told The Scientist. “It's stopped in recent months, fortunately, but I think there's a lot of leftover upset because we came in and sequenced the genome so ...