A-maize-ing!

I write often about the girls, and the pets, but not often enough about my son and daughter-in-law.  I'll work on that starting today.

On Monday the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St. Louis announced the completion of a working draft of the corn genome sequence.  This is big news for geneticists, plant breeders, and those doing basic research in plant biology.

Laura was in charge of the finishing effort for the project.  Even after Googling "finishing effort" I'm not sure what that is.  I'm waiting for Laura to email me with the details.  William says that he played a less significant role.  As Resource Controller for the Center his job was to receive all incoming DNA samples from collaborators, enter them into the GSC database, test them for contaminants, then submit them to the correct groups for processing.  As of yesterday he had processed 16,027 tubes of DNA and 364 96-well trays of stocks for those DNAs.  (He can correct me if I got something wrong.)

Both flew to DC this morning for the official press conference and to attend the 50th Annual Maize Genetics Conference.

I've been to the Center several times and gotten the grand tour twice.  The technology that makes research like this possible is mind-boggling.  As the Center's Co-Director recently wrote, "The recent introduction of instruments capable of producing millions of DNA sequence reads in a single run is rapidly changing the landscape of genetics..."  I'm convinced that the Center has enough computing capacity to run the NASA space program.

Update from Laura:  "Finishing or sequence improvement, involved the manual review of draft sequence data.  We look at the sequence when it is put back together and look for errors, and when possible fix them.  If it is not possible to fix them, we design experiments to improve the data.  This work is ongoing, the announcement is for the completion of the draft or raw assembled sequence.  We are not finishing the whole genome because corn is about 80%  repeats, so we are only focused on the unique gene regions."

Comments

[Allan]

Well done!

[Alison]

Well done, indeed!

[Margaret]

Mike, you have AMAZING children. In their own ways, they are creative, talented and intelligent. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree?

[Pam]

Really cool.