The genome finishers

摘要

From her windowless fifth-floor office at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Deanna Church has few distractions from the job that lies before her. On her computer sit 888 open 'tickets', or outstanding problems with the human genome sequence. Although that number fluctuates, it's a not-so-subtle reminder that she and her team at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) have along way to go to finish the job started nearly two decades ago by the Human Genome Project.