Europeans Move On From Yeast to TB

Abstract

London—Britain's Wellcome Trust has announced plans to pump $2 million into projects aimed at sequencing the genomes of two of the world's biggest killers: Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Plasmodium falciparum, the organisms responsible for tuberculosis and malaria. The announcement coincides with the completion of a European project to sequence the genome of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The entire genome of M. tuberculosis should be completed in a year; the P. falciparum project will start with chromosome 3 as a test. Both pose difficult technical challenges because the DNA tends to kink or rearrange during cloning.