Merck & Co. has delivered 15,000 human gene sequences toGenBank of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of thecompany's collaboration with Washington University to boost publicresearch of the human genome.

The delivery of the expressed gene sequences and related cDNAclones makes Merck, of Whitehouse Station, N.J., and WashingtonUniversity, in St. Louis, one of the three largest public contributorsof gene sequence data in the world.

Carolyn Tolstoshev, an NIH scientist who oversees the expressedsequence tag division of GenBank, said the other two are TheInstitute for Genomic Research (TIGR), of Gaithersburg, Md., andGenethon, of Evry, France. Both TIGR and Genethon are non-profitresearch centers.

GenBank, operated by the NIH's National Center for BiotechnologyInformation, is part of a network of gene sequence information thatincludes the European Bioinformatics Institute, of Cambridge,England, the DNA Data Bank of Japan in Mishima and the NationalCenter for Genome Resources, of Sante Fe, New Mexico.

The four groups share their information and are the world's largestpublic repositories of expressed human gene sequences.

Tolstoshev said Merck, TIGR and Genethon have contributed about75 percent of the nearly 61,000 human gene sequences contained inthe public data bases. The others have come mostly from academicresearchers.

Gene sequences are used by scientists to identify genes and theirmutations that cause diseases in an effort to design drugs to treat thedisorders. The number of gene sequences received by GenBankdoubles every 20 months and the data base gets about 15,000requests a day from researchers for access to the sequenceinformation.

Not all the gene sequences submitted to the public data basesrepresent individual genes. The data have to be analyzed andcompared with known genes before sequences are identified asredundant or new. Estimates of the total number of genes in thegenome range from 50,000 to 100,000. Researchers speculate about10 percent of the genome has been sequenced.

Merck's decision to make the gene sequences public as the data aregenerated is a departure from the norm for pharmaceutical andbiotechnology companies.

Jeff Sturchio, Merck's director of science and technology policy,said the company considers the gene sequencing information aresearch tool.

Merck recently hired Thomas Caskey, formerly head of the geneticsdepartment at Baylor University's School of Medicine in Houston, tolead the company's drug research efforts in the genomic field and todevelop corporate partnerships with other firms conducting similarwork.

Sturchio said the Merck Gene Index, the company's name for itscollaboration with Washington University, expects to process300,000 human gene sequences over the next 18 months. n

-- Charles Craig Staff Writer

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