Funding Sequencing Efforts

Letters from: [ Enriqueta Bond and M. J. Finley Austin ][1] [ Andre Goffeau ][1] In “Life with 6000 genes” (Articles, [25 Oct., p. 546][2]), Andre Goffeau et al . note that, despite the potential gain of sequencing a number of human pathogenic organisms, only limited funds have been made available for such projects. The Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the National Institute of Dental Research, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have recently co-funded a project at Stanford University to use “sample-sequencing” to identify genes in Candida albicans , a major pathogenic fungus. The researchers' strategy will reveal at least a portion of about 95% of all Candida genes that can be identified by their similarity to genes in other species. Information about the project will be announced on the C. albicans World Wide Web at server . The authors also make a bold and intriguing policy recommendation. > While we await the completion of the human genome sequence sometime around the year 2005, there is danger of dispersing sequencing power among too many model genomes. Instead, it may be desirable to direct sequencing capacity toward eukaryotic parasites (such as Plasmodium falciparum , Trypanosoma cruzei , Schistosoma mansoni , and Leishmania donovani ) that plague millions of people in developing countries. Because of the intermediate size of these genomes, this would be a more readily achievable task, the authors maintain, “provided that funding is increased from its present modest levels.” We strongly affirm this recommendation. A good start in this direction was made several years ago, when the Wellcome Trust, a United Kingdom-based medical charity, initiated a project to map the genome of P. falciparum , the parasite that causes malaria. Independently, the World Health Organization provided seed grants to establish Parasite Genome Networks for five other pathogenic organisms: Filaria , Schistosoma , Leishmania , Trypanosoma brucei , and T. cruzi . The malaria genome effort recently has received a significant boost: the Wellcome Trust, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the U.S. Department of Defense formed a funding consortium to begin sequencing the P. falciparum genome. However, other parasite networks are still struggling to secure the necessary funding to move forward rapidly, despite their great progress in developing international collaborative links and proving the feasibility of sequencing. In order to secure funding for this historically underserved research community, it will probably be necessary to seek funds from a variety of government and private sources interested in genomics as well as parasitology. The successful establishment of the P. falciparum consortium—an international working group of multiple private and public funding agencies—demonstrates the plausibility of this approach. What is now needed is the will to dedicate the funds. # Response {#article-title-2} I am pleased to learn that a project has been started on sample sequencing of C. albicans and that the Wellcome Trust has made a laudable start toward the sequencing of the Plasmodium genome. To my knowledge, the funding provided by Wellcome is significant, but far from being sufficient to ensure the rapid completion of the sequencing of this genome. The funds provided by the World Health Organization appear to barely make it possible to proceed toward the construction of sequence-ready libraries of five pathogens and are by no means sufficient to sequence these genomes. The Commission of the European Community does not seem to be getting involved in the sequencing of parasite genomes. But whatever happens, I believe that laboratories in developing countries should be involved in an organized way, rather than having the sequencing work done in only a few large Western sequencing centers. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.275.5303.1049f [2]: /lookup/volpage/275/546