Wellcome Trust Genome Campus officially opened by HRH Princess Anne

by Jean-Jack M. Riethoven
EMBL-Outstation Hinxton, European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, United Kingdom

HINXTON, United Kingdom -- One of the world's premier sites in genome sequencing and bioinformatics has been officially opened by HRH The Princess Royal on Wednesday 8 October. The £180 million Wellcome Trust Genome Campus is set in 55 acres of parkland nine miles south of Cambridge, and comprises the Sanger Centre, the Medical Research Council's UK Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre (HGMP Resource Centre), the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI, an Outstation of the EMBL in Heidelberg), and an international conference facility.

Sequencing at the Sanger Centre...

The international effort to sequence the entire human genome to an accuracy of 99.99% by the year 2005, The Human Genome Project, has its UK headquarters on the Genome Campus. The 300 scientists at the Sanger Centre, led by director Dr John Sulston, are working to sequence one-sixth of the three billion nucleotides of the human genome. Dr John Sulston said about this effort that "sequencing the human genome will not be the end but will be a very solid foundation for the future of bioinformatics research -- immediate benefits like diagnosis of certain (genetic) diseases are only the tip of the iceberg, the big future benefit being the complete understanding of the structure of life". The Sanger Centre not only concentrates on the human genome, but also has been sequencing micro-organisms (e.g. yeast), human pathogens (e.g. tuberculosis bacterium and malaria) and the nematode worm C. elegans. All the sequencing projects going on at the Sanger Centre make it the number one single sequence depositor in the world, to an excess of 10% of the total DNA sequencing done in the world.

Pufferfish comparative mapping at the HGMP-RC

The HGMP Resource Centre with its staff of 55 serves the scientific community with a wide range of specialist biological resources and services as well as computational support. Led by Dr Keith Gibson, the Resource Centre's main research activity is comparative mapping of the mouse and Japanese pufferfish genomes. Recently, the European Interspecific Backcross Project (mouse) has been completed. The involvement in mouse genetics will continue with a sequencing project in co-operation with the Mouse Genome Centre (Harwell, UK). "The importance of the mouse genome lies in similarity to the human genome and in the existence of a large range of interesting disease models", Keith Gibson noted.
The comparative mapping of Fugu rubripes (Japanese pufferfish) is done via the Landmark mapping project. The pufferfish has essentially the same number of genes as the human genome, but its genome size is approximately 400 megabases (less repetitive DNA and smaller introns). Although the genes are much smaller than human genes, the homology between Fugu and mammal is high enough, and isolation of Fugu homologies to human genomic regions greatly enhances gene finding.

EBI big in collecting data

Data generated by the two above centres is channelled to the European Bioinformatics Institute, which serves as a public domain clearing house for this genetic information. Value is added via databases of protein sequences, secondary and 3D structures, and last but not least the functions of certain genes. Thousands of researchers all over the world access these data daily, or submit their own. "This data is enormously valuable to scientists when exploited properly. In some sense the DNA is the boring part of biology -- lets face it: nobody gets high on reading DNA sequences. But the thing is that they code for all the important stuff in biology: they code for proteins, proteins form certain structures, the structure of the protein and other aspects of them enable them to perform particular functions in an organism -- and the EBI collects databases on the whole range", Graham Cameron remarked. The database at EBI is synchronised daily with its counterparts Genbank (NCBI, Washington) and the DNA Databank of Japan (NIG, Mishima). Per minute one new sequence is being deposited, and the total database size doubles every 18 months.
The current head of EBI is Professor Paolo Zanella; at the end of 1997 he will transfer his duties to the two newly appointed heads Graham Cameron and Michael Ashburner.

Free sequence data for all

All the three centres strongly support the policy of the Wellcome Trust on sequence release: to publicise it in an easy accessible way as soon as an individual sequence is available. The agreement on freely available genetics information was also reached at the Bermuda meeting, where several big contributors to genetical data came together to discuss these aspects of the ongoing sequencing efforts.
One of the newer international sequencing projects that is being set up, which will aim to completely sequence the 50 most important human pathogens over the next few years, will also adhere to these 'Bermuda principles'. This project will be a co-operation of the Wellcome Trust, the Sanger Centre and some pharmaceutical companies.

Article by: Jean-Jack M. Riethoven

More pictures of the opening are available on a separate page. Note that although thumbnails of the pictures are shown first, the approximate time to load the complete page including the images takes 1.5 minutes (14k4 modem), 50 seconds (28k8 modem) or 15 seconds (ISDN or faster).

Resources and further information

• European Bioinformatics Institute
  http://www.ebi.ac.uk/
• The Sanger Centre
  http://www.sanger.ac.uk/
• The Fugu project
  http://fugu.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/
• Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre
  http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/
• The Wellcome Trust
  http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/

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