Sequencing gone wild

Apparently Google is investing money in an effort to sequence [sort of] 100,000 genomes. Some excerpts from the article:

Church has already partially sequenced genomes from 10 people, and the jump to 100,000 is under review by a Harvard ethics panel

Right, it's only a scale-up of 4 orders of magnitude, that should be pretty easy ;-) To put this in perspective: to the best of my knowledge, there are currently only 4 complete human genome sequences in existence. [Venter's, Watson's, the original sequence from the Human Genome project, and the original sequence from Celera].

The Harvard scientist is controlling costs by sequencing only protein-making genes, which make up about 1 percent of the genome

This, to me, seems a bit weird. It's becoming pretty clear that there's a huge amount of information embedded in parts of the genome that don't code for proteins [ie the other 99% of the genome], and that individual variations in protein-making genes aren't even close to being the whole story when it comes to determining the differences between people. In other words, it's not clear that sequencing only protein-coding genes will really tell you all that much. Then again, it's probably a reasonable place to start, given the current limitations of sequencing technology.

Ross Muken, a Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. analyst in San Francisco, said Google is ideally suited to help consumers keep track of genetic data, as new sequencing technology becomes available.

``They want to have an ability to display to the individual their genetic information in a user-friendly interface,'' he said in a telephone interview. ``Who better to do that than Google?'''

Uhm, right, because Google is so good at user interfaces. Displaying genetic data, with the multiple possible levels of detail [individual base pairs, short functional elements like promoters, long functional elements like protein-coding sequences, linked functional elements like the exons that make up a gene, chromosome arms etc] and multiple ways of annotating it, is a much tougher problem than zooming in and out of a street map. [For an example of a genome map, go look at Jim Watson's genome].

All that said, George Church is a pretty smart guy, so I'm sure this is a much better thought-out project than the Bloomberg article makes it seem.