The announcement of the human genome sequence three years ago was widely hailed as one of the great scientific achievements in modern history. But sequencing the genome was just a first step--the monumental task of ascribing biological meaning to the genome has just begun. Dr. Takashi Gojobori of the Japan Biological Information Research Centre in Tokyo, Japan, (also of DNA Data Bank of Japan at National Institute of Genetics) has led an international consortium of 158 scientists from 44 institutions worldwide to produce a detailed functional map on more than 20,000 human genes using high quality full-length gene transcripts from publicly available resources.
The map will be a boon for geneticists, drug researchers, and genome and proteome scientists around the world. By relating intermediate gene products called messenger RNAs to each of their parent genes, and exhaustively connecting them to the relevant proteins, the consortium has made a unique contribution in establishing a truly reliable systematic network of human-curated relationships between genes and their biological functions.
The study, reported in the open access journal Public Library of Science Biology, has taken over two years to complete, and is expected to set the standard for analysis of gene expression and human diseases worldwide. The public H-Invitational database includes evidence for several thousands of newly discovered genes, their expression and genetic variation and is to be made available from April 20, 2004 at the URL: http://www.h-invitational.jp/. The consortium has established a connection between functions of genes and their products and to the clinical effects that each of them has upon human health.
“We are confident now that anyone in academia or industry who uses our database will gain far deeper insight into the meaning of human disease than was previously possible. We will soon expand this work through a Disease Edition of the consortium" stated Dr. Gojobori.
The work builds on the scientific traditions of international cooperation and large-scale collaboration, which have played such an important part in the deciphering of the human genome sequence itself. The consortium is made up of scientists from developed as well as developing nations, including Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Consortium members met on several occasions for scientific meetings and workshops around the world, and two large annotation jamborees were held in Tokyo in 2002 and 2003.