The independence of our genome assemblies.

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The characterization, analysis, and conclusions of Waterston et al. (1) with regard to our published work (2, 3) are incorrect. Celera was founded with the goal of applying the whole genome shotgun (WGS) strategy to assemble the sequence of the human genome as rapidly as possible to advance the field of genomics (4). Despite our previous arguments to the contrary (3), Waterston et al. (1) persist in their claims that Celera's assembly of the human genome, reported in 2001 (2), was simply a “refinement built upon the [Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (HGSC)] assemblies.” In fact, the Celera assemblies were constructed on the basis of mate-pair information from Celera sequence data, and the HGSC contribution to the structure and content was minimal.