Rice Genome Sequenced, and Race to Lock Up Genetic Intellectual Property Begins

An international consortium of researchers has announced the completion of the sequencing of the genome of the Oryza japonica subspecies of rice and published in the Aug. 11 issue of the journal Nature. The team of scientists completed an initial draft in 2002.

The sequence is 95 percent complete at greater than 99 percent accuracy and reveals 370 million base pairs and the locations of over 35,000 genes. The human genome sequence has 3 billion base pairs and 25,000 genes.

With a completed sequence in hand, at an estimated cost of $200 million, researchers can now begin to work to seek ways to improve production of this important plant, which provides a subsistance food to much of the world.

Additionally, the sequence information can be applied to research in other related crops such as corn, barley and wheat.

The announcement of this advance also is spurring thoughts of commercial breakthroughs.

Kapil Sibal, India's minister for science and technology, told The New India Express that India's participation in the sequencing effort “could ensure India’s food security’’ since ‘‘India now has complete access to the entire rice genome with no encumbrance related to intellectual property rights,” he said in an article published online.

“There will be a global race now to identify the valuable genes from the plethora of information that has been generated and these ‘precious genes’, which can definitely be patented,” he told the publication.

Seoul National University today announced the start of construction construction Friday of a $24 million medical bioengineering laboratory for stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk on its Kwanak campus, south of Seoul, according to an article in the Korea Times.

The South Korea government is footing the tab for the facility, which will be completed by October 2006. The seven-story complex will house labs for primate studies, stem cell research, animal cloning, and cell transplant and molecular biology research projects, the Korea Times said.

Additionally, the center will include a researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Scotland's Roslin Institute, the folks who created Dolly, the cloned sheep.

In India's Pharmaleader online publication, an article encourages students to look to the biotechnology sector.

With the biotechnology sector in India expected to add 10 lakh jobs by 2012, it is a happening career destination, writes Neeraj Bagga

”Set to witness an IT-like revolution in the country, this field is now a hot career option for students,” he writes.

The California Institute of Technology announced that Ahmed Zewail, director of the laboratory for molecular sciences and a Nobel Prize laureate, has received an $18 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to create the Ultrafast Science and Technology (UST) Center at the school.

The center will focus on “physical biology," a term Zewail uses to describe the search to understand the behavior of biological systems by directly observing them in the "four dimensions of space and time."

Like other cross-disciplinary systems biology efforts just beginning to gather momentum across this country's academic institutions, the center will serve to bring together Caltech researchers in physics, chemistry, and biology with the goal of creating new ways to “see” biology at the molecular level, and through time.