Separating Genes from Chaff - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Applied Genetics News,  Feb, 2000  

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Orion Genomics, LLC (4141 Forest Park Ave., St. Louis, MO; Tel: 314/615-6977, Fax: 314/615-6975, Website: www.oriongenomics.com) has successfully applied its GeneThresher technology to the corn (maize) genome. GeneThresher sequencing is a new gene discovery tool that permits the discovery of genes within a plant genome without sequencing the repetitive content. Robert A. Martienssen, a plant scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and a co-founder of Orion Genomics, discussed the methyl-filtration technology at the eighth annual Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego, January 8-12.

Of the 2.6 billion bases in the corn genome (nearly as large as a human), only about 8% is expected to represent genes. Robert A. Martienssen, W. Richard M. McCombie, and Pablo Rabinowicz are the CSHL scientists who invented the GeneThresher technology. They showed that the bulk of the repetitive, intergenic, non-coding DNA in corn is methylated, and therefore distinguishable from genes. Much of this methylated, non-coding DNA can be eliminated by "filter cloning" genomic libraries in a series of engineered bacterial strains. These results were published in the November 1, 1999 issue of the journal Nature Genetics.

"Interestingly, four out of every five corn genes that the GeneThresher technology identified were not represented in the public corn expressed sequence tag ("EST") database," says Robert K. Wilson, CEO of Orion. "Unlike ESTs, the GeneThresher technology sampled the entire structure of the gene and examples of promoter regions were found within the Orion Genomics dataset." He expects the GeneThresher methods to reduce the time and cost of analyzing the corn genome by a factor of 10.

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