Japan's rice sequencing effort trumped by US firm

Japan's inadequate response to intensifying competition in international genome research was highlighted last week, when the future of the Japanese government's Rice Genome Sequencing Project was thrown into doubt by the news that Celera Genomics - the US company set up by geneticist J. Craig Venter - plans to sequence the entire rice genome in just six weeks. The report, which initially appeared in the Japanese biotechnology newsletter Nikkei Biotechnology, was confirmed by Venter who said that the commercial database of the rice genome would be made available to companies for $30m on a five year contract. This initiative has also upset researchers working on the international rice genome project, a ten-year, $200m project that plans to complete the sequencing by 2008.