Celera prices shotgun genome at $45,000

[编者的话]

Celera公司和公共科学界的矛盾正在继续尖锐化，日前在苏格兰举行的一次会议上越来越多的听到了指责Celera的声音。Celera公司目前正在进行小鼠基因组的测序工作，并且已经接近完成。目前，唯一能接触到Celera小鼠测序数据的方法是购买Cerela出品的名为CDS的软件系统，通过该系统来获得Celera公司的测序结果。这个软件包目前售价四万五千美圆。

by Adam Rutherford, BioMedNet News

Scottish academics today gave Celera, the US genomics data company, a cool reception at a meeting in Edinburgh hosted by the company to promote its shotgun-sequenced mouse genome and an accompanying software package. The meeting at Murrayfield Conference Centre, billed as a science conference on the use of comparative genomics, quickly evolved into a marketing campaign, too quickly for some of the 40 or so invited delegates. A similar conference is due to be staged in London tomorrow.

Celera's attempt to emphasize the revolution in the way it now reveals genomic information failed to impress Alan Archibald, head of genomics at Edinburgh's Roslin Institute, the home of Dolly, the cloned sheep. Celera "overstates the difference between pre- and post-genomic presentation of data," he told BioMedNet News. "I'm not advocating a Luddite approach to the post-genomic era," he added. "We shouldn't go back to using quills."

Archibald also questioned the accuracy of the company's data. "There is an attitude that 'the computer told me it's true, ergo, it's true'," he added. "But you shouldn't always believe what [Celera's genetic] assemblies tell you."

The criticism follows an analysis of Celera's Drosophila genome sequence by Stanford University mathematician Samuel Karlin and colleagues, published in Nature last month, that highlighted "numerous and significant discrepancies" between Celera's data and Stanford's own.

At the meeting, John Lewis, Celera's academic sales director, dismissed this criticism as a "storm in a tea cup." In any event, he says, the company is helping to prepare a response for publication in Nature at some date in the future.

Celera's mouse genome sequence is not publicly available, but access to it can be bought with an analytical software platform described by one delegate as "all-singing, all-dancing." The price of the package, the Celera Discovery System (CDS), to an individual principal investigator is $45,000 for a three-year contract.

CDS is currently the only way to analyze Celera's mouse genome sequence, which the company claims has been drafted by going over the entire genome more than five times. The package also comes with access to a number of databases and data-crunching software, both public and private, which are linked to information on gene and protein structure, and on diseases. For an extra $4,000 per user, purchasers gain access to Celera's 3.5 million-strong human single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) files.

Security of private research information, once users are linked to the Celera database, concerns Ela Hunt, a researcher in genomic databases at the University of Glasgow. "In any legal agreement there needs to be a clause that Celera will not use that data," she said. "In a database world, any [Web] administrator has access and could make a publication out of [the information]."

Celera's bioinformatics director, Tony Kerlavage, tried to re-assure Hunt. "We have no intention of doing that," he insisted. "We do not look at any of that data, which is very well sequestered in our IT group, and none of the Celera scientists have access to user areas."

One satisfied customer is Mark Magnusson, professor of molecular physiology and biophysics at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, whom Celera presented at the Edinburgh meeting. He has been using CDS since May last year to aid his research into type-2 diabetes. "There are dangers with in silico biology, but the Celera information allows me to do so many things that I couldn't do in the lab," he told delegates.