As well as leading China's contribution to the human genome sequence and working with Danish partners on the pig genome, this week the institute announced completion of a detailed map of the rice genome.
At the core of this progress is the improving ability to sequence the human genome.
New machines from IBM and EMC will replace the supercomputers used to sequence the human genome.
Craig Venter tied (some say beat) the mighty U.S. government in the race to sequence the human genome.
He made headlines racing the government to sequence the human genome in 2000.
Before that, he was involved in the effort to sequence the human genome.
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They enlisted the help of several scientists, including Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who went on to become a leading light in the effort to sequence the human genome.
But since the first draft sequence of the human genome was released in 2000, scientists have realized that junk DNA plays a key role in switching genes on and off.
At first he teamed up with Bill Haseltine , a virus geneticist with a record as an entrepreneur, to start an institute and a company, Human Genome Sciences, to exploit expressed sequence tags.
Though the firm has proved the principle, a single pore would take about 70 days to sequence an entire human genome (which has roughly the same number of letters as 1, 000 Russian novels).
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The monumental effort to sequence the entire human genome -- to spell out the 3 billion or so combinations of those letters in a cell's DNA -- is keeping a lot of academic and commercial laboratories busy.
Case in point: On Monday, DeCode Genetics published an important genetic map--assembled by methods very different from those used to create the sequence of the human genome--that will make it much easier for scientists to hunt down new genes linked to disease.
It's also the 10th anniversary of the completion of the Human Genome Project, which set out to sequence the more than 3 billion letters in our genetic code.
Ten years after the completion of the human genome project, competition between instrument makers and attempts to capture medical value from DNA sequence data continue to make the news.
Back then, Celera Genomics (nyse: CRA - news - people ) and the publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP) had yet to show off their drafts of the human DNA sequence and Celera's market cap was nearly eight times what it is now.
From this humble beginning it now plans to sequence 200 full human genomes as part of an international collaboration called the 1, 000-genome project.
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