London

The Wellcome Trust, the world's largest medical charity, has banned its grant recipients from using its funding to subscribe to the human genome sequence prepared by Celera Genomics. Instead it wants them to use the public human genome sequence, which it partially funded and helped to prepare.

A Wellcome policy statement says that 'no trust funds, including contingency monies, may be used for the purpose of accessing Celera subscription services'. Trust-funded researchers accessing Celera's sequence must do so with money “from sources wholly independent of the trust.”

A spokesperson for Celera said that Wellcome Trust researchers would still be able to access the company's data: “We have a free site and so presumably they will have access that way.”

“There is no evidence that Celera's database offers any scientific advantage,” says Mike Dexter, director of the trust. “This is not a ban: we are just trying to get the best value for trust money.”

The trust uses revenues from its £15 billion (US$21 billion) asset base to fund biomedical research in UK universities and, to a lesser extent, in the developing world. It distributes about £600 million in grants every year, including funding for the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, the UK arm of the Human Genome Project.