WHEN Craig Venter was racing against the publicly funded consortium to sequence the human genome, the rival groups often clashed over whose method was better. Now a team that includes researchers from both camps has delivered a more considered verdict.
The 鈥渨hole genome shotgun鈥� approach pioneered by Venter involves smashing an entire genome to bits and trying to put it back together again without any idea of the overall picture. It is fast and cheap, but it misses important chunks, concludes Evan Eichler at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.
Eichler鈥檚 team compared the sequence produced by the company Venter founded, Celera, with the latest public version (Nature, vol 431, p 927). 鈥淲e found that duplicated regions were not properly assembled by the approach,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hese regions are important for human genetic disease and for evolution.鈥�
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鈥淭he shotgun approach is fast and cheap, but it misses important chunks of genome鈥�
Team member Aaron Halpern, who helped develop the shotgun method with Venter, points out that the method fails only for around 3 per cent of the genome.