DNA Sequencing Complete in Record Time!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 8 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

Dr. Watson, I presume? Although criticisms remain -- largely that the small fragments into which the man's genome was snipped might not have been reassembled properly -- a full genome in only four months is plenty to crow about.

Watson's genome is not the first to be sequenced. We may recall that J. Craig Venter's was as well, but Venter's project cost US$100 million and Watson's only $1.5 million.

What strikes me about this article is that it's the first time I've seen any reference to an X-Prize for sequencing

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Reasearchers appeal to the private sector: Please sequence my eel!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 10 months 4 weeks (www.nature.com)

This is not the first time that cash-strapped researchers have gone on a mission of whining so that someone else will shell out the $10 million that it can take for a full organism genome to be sequenced. Someone actually convinced a backer that the tammer wallaby would be a good idea (I kid; the tammer wallaby is actually a model organism for some forms of research), but the electric eel, although technically not a member of that most tasty-when-broiled family, the true eels, is surely one of the most interesting.

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New Criteria for Selecting the Origin of DNA Replication in Wolbachia and Closely Related Bacteria

Reviver submitted, created time 1 year 6 months (www.biomedcentral.com)

"The sequences of the ori regions described here are only similar among closely related bacteria while fundamental characteristics like presence of DnaA and IHF binding sites as well as the boundary genes are more widely conserved. The relative paucity of CtrA binding sites in the ori regions, as well as the absence of key enzymes associated with DNA replication in the respective genomes, suggest that several of these obligate intracellular bacteria may have altered replication mechanisms

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