HUMAN GENOME: UC-Santa Cruz Offers Map on Its Web Site
The University of California-Santa Cruz last week unveiled a Web site, http://genome.ucsc.edu/, that provides the only downloadable version of the completely assembled human genome, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. UC-Santa Cruz professor David Haussler and a team of computer scientists put the 400,000 gene fragments in the correct order, at the request of Eric Lander, head of the government-funded genome center at the Whitehead Institute. The data has been provided to U.S. and European agencies and will serve as the foundation of the official genome libraries. The copy of the genome presented on the UC-Santa Cruz Web site "just about fit[s] on a CD-ROM" and can be downloaded on a DSL line in about an hour and a half. Although UC-Santa Cruz did not play a significant role in the government-funded genome effort, scientists first discussed the notion of sequencing the entire human genome at a 1985 UC-Santa Cruz conference. With their Web site endeavor, UC-Santa Cruz is "in a sense taking a bow for its role in this scientific enterprise" (Abate, 7/7).
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