Thu, Dec 5, 2002: PatternHunter software provides human-mouse genome comparison for the Mouse Genome Consortium

Waterloo, Dec. 5, 2002. Bioinformatics Solutions Inc. (BSI) today announced the Mouse Genome Sequence Consortium has used BSI's PatternHunter software to compare the entire mouse and human genomes. The results, reported today in the journal Nature, ("Initial sequencing and comparative analysis of the mouse genome," December 5, 2002) provide an important tool for life science research. Determination of the mouse genome sequence is important as it provides key comparative information to the human genome which can provide important clues in research of many human diseases. Comparative studies between the human genome and the mouse genome provide hints of mammalian evolution, key protein evolution, and information on disease related genes. To complete this comparative study, a key step was to compare the complete human and mouse genomes. This is no small task considering the current sequence comparison software standard, BLAST, would require over 20 years to perform this task of at reasonable sensitivity. In order to complete the study in a timely fashion MIT Whitehead chose BSI's PatternHunter software. PatternHunter performed sequence comparisons of entire mouse and human genome sequences, each of approximately 3 billion base pairs, to identify regions of similarity. As PatternHunter is over two orders of magnitude faster than BLAST, the Mouse Genome Sequence Consortium produced results in a small fraction of the time required by BLAST.