The publicly-funded Human Genome Project (HGP) is on track to complete its first draft by the end of June, Francis Collins, director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, announced last week. The first draft of the human genome will be available on the internet via GenBank, the HGP's public database.
The international collaboration has now sequenced over two billion of the three billion DNA base-pairs that make up the human genome, just four months after both the HGP and commercial rivals Celera reached the one billion base pair mark. Celera says it will publish a more complete version sometime later this summer.
Dr Craig Venter, head of Celera, claims that the HGP's data are mostly in the form of short fragments, and that the site of each fragment is only roughly known. But Dr David Lipman, director of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information, argues that the first draft will still be useful to scientists. 'A lot of what people want to do can be done with the draft sequence', he says.
The HGP's first draft will cover 90 per cent of the human genome, and will be 99.9 per cent accurate, say researchers. They expect to complete the final version by 2003.
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