Rivals in the sometimes acrimonious race to sequence the human genome are working together to unravel the genomic software powering the rat, an animal often used as a model to help understand disease in people, the National Institutes of Health announced yesterday.
Celera Genomics Group, which recently published its human genome sequence in the journal Science, and the Baylor College of Medicine, a key sequencing center for the rival publicly funded project that published in Nature, have been awarded two new grants totaling $58.5 million to help sequence the rat.
The awards, $21 million of which will go to Celera over the next two fiscal years, are meant to speed up a publicly funded rat DNA-sequencing project begun at the end of the 1999 fiscal year. The additional money was awarded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute, the NIH agency that has overseen the publicly funded project.
"I was told Celera applied for it and they measured up," Research Institute spokesman Geoff Spencer said of how Celera was chosen. "It was as simple as that."
Neither Francis Collins, head of the publicly funded project, nor Celera President J. Craig Venter could be reached for comment yesterday. But the two were more than civil earlier last month as they sat next to each other at a joint press conference announcing the Science and Nature publications. At one point, Collins even threw his arm around Venter, proclaiming, "We're buddies."
In a statement yesterday, Venter said Celera was pleased to be involved in the project. The rat genome, he said, is a model that "should aid researchers in their quest for a better understanding of basic human biology and health and thus to find improved cures and treatments for disease."
Doug Smith, a sequencing expert for Waltham, Mass.-based Genome Therapeutics Corp., another company collaborating to sequence that rat, said yesterday that Celera's inclusion in a public project shows that things "have evolved to a different level." What's more, the former rivals - who once sparred publicly about whose DNA-sequencing approach was better - will be using a combination of the two approaches to unravel the genome of the rat.
"Certainly, they're no longer rivals because they're part of the same project," Smith said. "That speaks for itself."
