Washington

Genome assemblers from the private and public human genome sequencing projects finally met in peace at a workshop on 6 June, and found plenty of areas of common interest to discuss.

The much-heralded meeting — initially promised as part of the truce between the rival genome projects announced on 26 June 2000 by President Bill Clinton (see Nature 405, 983–984; 2000) — took place on neutral territory, at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's headquarters near Washington.

“The goal of the meeting is to try and move forward and find out what common goals we have,” explained Gene Myers, a mathematician who helped to devise the gene-assembly programme used by Celera of Rockville, Maryland, for its private project. Myers co-chaired the meeting with David Haussler, a computer scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who had a prominent role in the public genome project, which is led in the United States by the National Institutes of Health.

Participants at the meeting, including gene-assembly and annotation experts from both projects, agreed that future sequencing projects of large genomes are likely to use a combination of the whole-genome shotgun approach pioneered by Celera and the clone-by-clone approach used by the public genome project.

There was agreement that the particular nature of an organism's genome, and the uses to which it might be put, would determine the appropriate strategy. “My feeling is that one approach to genome sequencing does not fit all,” said Evan Eichler of Case Western Reserve University at Cleveland, Ohio. Eichler said he hoped the meeting would mark “a new era of détente” between the private and public projects.

Researchers using the genome data asked for more effort from both projects to build on the draft sequences and to deal with the large error rates being encountered. “Right now, with both the Celera and the public data sets, it is difficult to tell the difference between an interesting variant and a mistake in the data,” said Sean Eddy of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

The meeting was attended by Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and other leaders of the genome effort, but not by Craig Venter, president of Celera.