The genetic code of the mouse has been cracked by the same private company that unravelled the human genome last June.
Controversially, Celera Genomics of Rockville, Maryland, will only show its newly assembled mouse genome to paying subscribers.
Researchers striving to sequence the mouse as part of an international, publicly-funded consortium say that without seeing the sequence themselves, they cannot judge how accurate it is.
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But the company is adamant that its mouse data will be available only to paying subscribers.
鈥淲e will not publish this in the same way as we did with the human genome and the fly genome,鈥� says Heather Kowalski, a company spokeswoman. 鈥淭he mouse genome will not be freely available,鈥� she says.
The mouse genome is valuable commercially because it is so similar to the human genome. 鈥淭he mouse is the Rosetta stone in terms of better understanding the human genome,鈥� says Kowalski.
The genome data should help to reveal why humans are so sophisticated despite only having 30,000 genes 鈥� just twice the number found in a worm.
By seeing what happens to mice when specific genes are 鈥渒nocked out鈥�, researchers can discover what the genes do. Most of these genes will have a counterpart in humans that probably does a similar job.
Craig Venter, the gene entrepreneur who set up Celera in 1998, says that the assembled mouse genome is the latest validation of the company鈥檚 鈥渨hole genome sequencing鈥� technology.
Celera smashes an entire genome into millions of slugs of DNA. These fragments are then multiplied in bacteria and reassembled again by computer algorithms which identify points of overlap.
Celera has analysed six entire copies of the mouse genome in this way, from three strains of lab mouse. It claims that mouse DNA contains about 2.6 billion nucleotide building blocks compared with 2.9 billion in humans.
But researchers contributing to the publicly-funded mouse sequencing project are sceptical. They are ploughing through the DNA more systematically, so that they know unambiguously where each fragment sits in the genome.
鈥淗ow do they know where the bits go?鈥� says Jane Rogers, head of sequencing at the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, a major contributor to the public effort. 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the certainty it鈥檚 right? What we don鈥檛 see are the checks put in place to see that it really is correct.鈥�
Rogers says that Celera鈥檚 assembly of the human genome, published this February in Science, relied heavily on data put straight onto the internet by its publicly funded rivals. Kowalski admits this. 鈥淲e did indeed utilise the public data,鈥� she says.
But with the mouse, the company decided to go it alone, relying solely on its own data to dispel any doubts about the whole-genome sequencing technique.
Rogers says that the publicly funded researchers have sequenced three entire copies of mouse DNA, but they have yet to produce a complete assembly like Celera鈥檚.
Unlike Celera, however, the publicly-funded researchers are posting their raw mouse sequences straight onto the Internet.
