The Six Billion Letter Man Makes DNA Breakthrough

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 5-26-2006 | Roger Highfield

[blam]

The six billion letter man makes DNA breakthrough

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 26/05/2006)

An american scientist has become the first person in history to gaze at his entire genetic makeup, the DNA recipe book that he inherited from his parents.

Craig Venter, 59, one of the pioneers of the effort to read all the genes in a human - the human genome - has now gone much further and produced the ultimate autobiography, one written in six billion "letters" of DNA. This heralds a new era of medicine, that of personal genomics.

While the first draft human genomes, unveiled in 2000, marked an extraordinary scientific feat, they were actually composites of DNA from different people: the one produced by Mr Venter's company Celera was based on five individuals, including his.

More fundamentally, the draft genomes represented only half of our inheritance. Mr Venter and a rival international consortium - backed mostly by the United States government and Britain's Wellcome Trust - had each read three billion letters of genetic code, when the cells in our bodies contain two slightly different genomes, one from each parent, making six billion letters.

A few months from now, the first entire genetic recipe of a single human will be unveiled in an unnamed journal, as a result of a new effort costing many millions of dollars.

All six billion letters of Mr Venter's DNA code will then be poured into a public computer database called GenBank, providing new impetus to the field of human genetics.

While medicine has linked scraps of DNA to disease and other traits, future analyses based on the entire genetic make-up of thousands, even millions of people, will provide profound insights into the complex relationship between nature and nurture.

The Venter DNA will eventually show the genes that act with education and upbringing to shape his health, outlook and even his personality.

Mr Venter, now the president of the J Craig Venter Institute, in Rockville, Maryland, came in for much criticism during the genome race because he was so closely identified with efforts to withhold DNA data and commercialise human genes.

Rival US government-backed scientists accused the Vietnam veteran of putting the future of biology in jeopardy with what they likened to a land grab of our inheritance.

It took the intervention of President Bill Clinton to bring about a truce.

As a result of his pressure, the rival genomes were unveiled in June 2000 at a ceremony at the White House, marking the climax of the biggest concerted undertaking in the history of biology.

There have been years of argument over who did the better job but Dr Jim Kent of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the computer ace who put the Government-led genome together, says today that Venter's draft was better - thanks in part to using his rivals' freely available data.

But behind Venter's White House triumph lay a secret. Celera had announced that its genome was blended from the DNA of two men and three women. Venter later acknowledged that 60 per cent of the genes Celera had sequenced in its $100 million effort were from his own blood and sperm.

"I have regrets about the way it was exposed publicly," he said. As for doing it, "I have no regrets at all."

Now he has completed reading the rest of his DNA and produced what he calls the Human Reference Genome. So far, an analysis of his DNA confirms that he does indeed have blue eyes and suggests that Venter has a variant of Klotho, a gene linked to long life.

Dr Hamilton "Ham" Smith, the Nobel laureate who helped apply Venter's "shotgun" method of reading DNA code, says the project "makes a lot of sense" because the 2000 draft genome was much criticised. Sir John Sulston, a Nobel laureate - called it a "con job".

The new feat proved his "shotgun" approach works, said Dr Smith. Moreover: "Craig wanted to be the first human ever to have knowledge of his own genome."

[mikrofon]

This has great implications towards the eventual success
of cloning, when inevitably (and ironically) someone will
then be able say-

"We can rebuild him -- we have the technology..."

[lepton]

An american scientist has become the first person in history to gaze at his entire genetic makeup, [...] one written in six billion "letters" of DNA.

He looked at all 6 Billion letters? Wow. Talk about dull reading.

[gas_dr]

AGCT...it makes for a great read...