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A Billion Base Pairs—Landmark for the Human Genome Project
Scientists from the U.S. and U.K. celebrated the deposition of the billionth base pair of the human genome into public databases via a live video link that relayed proceedings from a special ceremony taking place at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. Tuesday's celebrations mean that the project is now one-third of the way to completing a working draft of the entire genome by spring next year.

Amid star-shaped balloons and a crowd wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the double helix, Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, congratulated geneticists from California to Cambridge, MA to Cambridge, England.

"We are happy to be here to have a party today.… One billion base pairs and counting!" Collins said to a gathering at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.

Also at the celebration in Washington were Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose agencies are participating in the global project.

Of the 1 billion base pairs sequenced so far, 468 million are in final, verified form. An additional 665 million are in a working draft that will be further verified by computer. This accomplishment puts the Human Genome Project on schedule to complete and verify the entire biological blueprint by 2003, according to officials.

By next spring, Collins said, a working draft of the entire human genome will be completed. It will take an additional three years to carefully verify the sequences to produce a final result that Collins said would be "accurate, assembled and mapped."

During the early years of the project, much of the work involved developing technology to speed the sequencing and to enhance the accuracy, said Collins, but in recent months the work has accelerated.

"Most of the 1 billion base pairs have been sequenced in the last seven months," he said.

Celera Completes Drosophila Sequence
In an effort that began just last May, Celera Genomics scientists have sequenced all 1.8 billion base pairs from the Drosophila genome using the somewhat controversial shotgun method. While some scientists feel that technique can miss important bits of the sequence, Celera says the method catches everything that matters.

"The completion of Drosophila will validate the effectiveness of Celera's whole genome shotgun approach in deciphering complex genomes," J. Craig Venter, president of the company, said.

"By comparison, the first genome of a free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, consisting of two million letters of genetic code, took one year to complete, and other early genomes not using Celera's whole genome shotgun strategy took over a decade to complete," a statement from the company said.

There is still work to be done on the fruit fly, Venter points out, "What's done is the sequencing phase, akin to gathering all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Now they have to put them together. We have to close the gaps."

After sequencing Drosophila, Celera has said it will now turn its full attention to the human genome. "On the Tuesday after Labour Day, we switched everything 100% to sequencing the human genome," said Venter.

"Between now and the end of the year we will have covered at least 70% of the human genome, and by early spring, by February or March, we should have 90% of it covered."