The battle against malaria, ranked by the World Health Organization among the most pressing public health concerns worldwide, has driven the genome project -- an extensive collaboration between academic researchers, government scientists, nonprofit corporations, the Department of Defense, international health organizations, private foundations and public funding agencies. Plasmodium falciparum is by far the most complex pathogen genome sequenced to date, requiring extraordinary effort and ingenuity on behalf of the sequencing centers.
The sequencing of Plasmodium's roughly 30 million nucleotides -- 1 percent as many as in the human genome -- began in 1996. The genome has been sequenced several times over in a series of random pieces, which have been fitted together to recreate much of the genome. Several of the organism's 14 chromosomes have been completely sequenced and annotated, and scientists are now filling in the few remaining gaps and annotating the entire genome sequence. The sequencing effort has already identified virtually all of the parasite's genes.
"Like the sequencing of the human genome, that of Plasmodium falciparum has generated huge amounts of data," said Roos, also the director of Penn's Genome Institute. "While it may take years before all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed, it is important to provide researchers with access to the raw data as soon as possible and to equip them with tools to transform this data into a useful form."
The database created by the Penn team is a milestone for bioinformatics, which seeks to bring order to the flood of data generated by various genome projects. Scientists can use built-in data-mining tools to examine chromosome organization, to scan the genome for probable genes, to predict the stru
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Contact: Steve Bradt
bradt@pobox.upenn.edu
215-573-6604
University of Pennsylvania
5-Apr-2001