Scientists announced Wednesday that they had deciphered chromosome 20, the largest of the three chromosomes to be sequenced thus far. Researchers hope that this latest advance by the Human Genome Project will help explain why some people are more susceptible to diseases such as diabetes or obesity. Also the gene that seems to make some a higher risk for Cruetzfeldt--Jakob Disease, the human...

Bioremediation, or the use of micro-organisms to reduce, eliminate, or contain contaminants, is a growing and hopeful field. Toxic waste has always been a messy problem, but an engineered form of a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans has researchers excited about the use of this bacterium for toxic waste clean-up. In a recent study, D. radiodurans transformed radioactive toxic mercury...

On April 6, Celera Genomics announced that it had completed the sequencing phase of one person's genome. It will now begin the process of assembling the sequenced fragments into their proper order with the aid of powerful computers. Work on this project began in September 1999 using a method called "whole genome shotgun sequencing," a quicker method than that used by the international Human Genome...

An international research team has completed the first plant genome sequence ever, for the species Arabidopsis thaliana. This news and four accompanying articles are featured in the December 14, 2000 issue of the journal Nature. This Website is from the National Science Foundation's news service and describes the recent advance.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Library of Medicine (part of the National Institutes of Health) has just posted a new gene of the Human Genome (first described in the October 25, 1996 Scout Report), showing the positions, associated data and annotations for more than 30,000 human gene-based markers. Produced "by a collaboration of 63 scientists from government,...

The purpose of this moderated newsgroup is to provide a proper forum for the discussion of issues pertaining to and involving genome and/or chromatin structure and function. Primarily it should enable those researchers who work in genome/chromatin structure or related fields to communicate ideas and information, as well as provide a chance for collaboration among national and international...

The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) has recently placed online this new genomic resource, in concert with a new publication. TIGR has released a description (.pdf format) of the minimal set of genes essential for life (Hutchison et al., 1999, Science 286:2165-2169).

Gramene is a "curated, open-source, Web-accessible data resource for comparative genome analysis in the grasses," funded by the United States Department of Agriculture. The searchable database, containing data derived from related public projects, may be queried with the rice genome browser, blast search, map search, or phenotype search, to name just a few. Gramene is frequently updated; recent...

In an effort to track the progress of and provide access to the work of the Human Genome Project (see the October 14, 1998 Scout Report for Science & Engineering), the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has expanded their Web resource. An international research program "designed to construct detailed genetic and physical maps of the human...

The color graphics data for meiotic double-stranded breaks were provided in tabular and graphical form by Drs. Frederic Baudat and Alain Nicolas of the Institut Curie, Section de Recherche. The data are part of their published study, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, Volume 94, pages 5213-5218. A link to the original article (available in HTML or .pdf formats) is...