Human genome project Europe

The principality of Monaco was the setting for a conference* on the utilization of the information being generated by the Human Genome Project (HGP). After successful conferences covering this area in the United States of America, this meeting organized by Cambridge Healthtech Institute was the first in Europe. Genome centres world-wide are engaged in the HGP with the ultimate goal of elucidating and characterizing the complete sequence of the 3 X 109 base pairs (bp) of the human’genome. While the HGP is principally an academic venture, the applications of genomics are already of major commercial significance. It was therefore appropriate that there was a higher proportion of speakers and parti-cipants from companies, both pharmaceutical and biotechnological, as opposed to academic institutes. The emphasis of the presentations was genomic technology, the subtitle of the conference being Gcnomes, Diseases, Drugs and Diagnostics. The meeting, like the HGP, started with genome mapping (Howard Cann, Centre d’Etudes du Polymorphism Humain CEPH, Paris). The systematic mapping of transcripts has used almost 700000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) currently in Genbank, and these are estimated to represent over 55 000 distinct human genes. A third generation genetic map (100 kb resolution) of the human genome is being constructed and will be based on biallelic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs); it is predicted an estimated frequency 3 x lo-2-lC-3 bp. The progress of sequencing the human genome was described by David Buck (Sanger Centre, Cambridge, UK). The target for completion of the HGP is the year 2005 and progress has been encouraging on about 50% of human chromosomes; the question of who will sequence the remaining 50% is