Fawdron Basilica

All I know is that at one point, Celera and the public effort were racing each other to complete the sequence, and Celera had a faster technique (shotgun) and appeared likely to win the race. There were all sorts of fears that Celera would patent part of or even all of the human genome.

Next thing there seems to be an "arranged tie" between the two competitors, and all the information gleaned seems to have been released into the public domain. While this seems to be a very favourable solution for most concerned, what do Celera get out of pumping millions of dollars into this project if the sequence is public knowledge anyway?

I've tried to read up on this, but without much success, and I was hoping someone could recommend a good book, article, or website that goes into some detail as to what exactly this "arranged tie" involved and what its consequences were... Any help much appreciated.

MortalWombat

Well, for starters, the name Celera is now permanently embedded in your brain, right?

faust

I can't point to a book or article, but I can tell you some of what Celera is getting out of this. Annotation. The sequence itself doesn't tell you anything unless you can figure out what it means, and they have undertaken a huge effort to organize the map, annotate possible genes, predict gene sequences (introns vs exons, coding regions, etc) and tie them to putative functions. This is what is valuable. Suppose you are doing experiments to pick out genes that might be important for whatever you're studying, you sequence them (we do it in house) and you BLAST search them to see what they might do, or if there are any domains in common with other known genes, and you are either happy that you get some good matches in the hits that would make biological sense, or you are happy that you don't get any hits and you might have found "the gene for x" or whatever. So you might want to go search in Celera's proprietary annotation and analysis of the map to see if -they've- got something on that sequence. There's a catch though, and this is what they get out of it. Money. You gotta pay to look at their stuff. And I mean pay.
Just my lab alone spends $20,000 per year for access to it, with a 3 year contract. And that doesn't allow anyone in my institution to use it, just us. Plus if you use anything from it, you must cite them too, and people read those cites.

Now IMHO, Celera is a buncha shifty business people, match a gene one day to say 10 hits, next day you get 12, but only 6 of those are the same as yesterday. They call it "updating". We call it "irritating"

sugarbeth

Well, I can tell you there are still some hefty gaps left in the sequence, much to my chagrin. Even with both the Celera and public databases combined. We have Celera access in our lab, but I prefer the public database - UC Santa Cruz has my favorite genome browser.

Celera's new thing is Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) with their new "Assays on Demand". I think they're trying to make some money that way now.

I just wish that nobody would have said the sequence was finished - because it's not, and now it doesn't seem like anyone is in any big rush to actually do it anymore.