ORNL Team Builds and Analyzes Human Chromosomes 5, 16, and 19 (April 2000)

A team of researchers in the Computational Biosciences Section, in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute and University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioinformatics, has assembled and annotated three human chromosomes sequenced in draft form by the DOE Joint Genome Institute. The chromosome assembly process used ORNL supercomputers to build continuous sequence "contigs" from the many thousands of draft sequence fragments. This resulted in about 57 million unique base pairs for chromosome 19, 72 million for chromosome 16 and 188 million for chromosome 5. This is a total of 317 million unique base pairs of DNA sequence or about 10% of the human genome. Chromosome 5 itself is considerably larger than the entire Drosophila (fruit fly) genome recently released by Celera Genomics. Analysis of the three chromosomes using computer-based gene finders resulted in the identification and initial characterization of approximately 12,000 human genes to which functional role assignments are being made by the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioinformatics. Views of the chromosomes, genes and related information are available at the JGI website. URL: http://www.jgi.doe.gov. (Contact: Ed Uberbacher, 574-6192, uberbacherec@ornl.gov; Funding Source: DOE-OBER) – April 2000