On November 20, 2009, the consortium published results of its sequencing effort in Science.
Dr. Huntington Willard, a genome expert at Duke, said the sequencing effort was "nearly heroic."
This sequencing effort revealed that the lamprey has unusual GC content and amino acid usage patterns compared to other vertebrates.
Generating large sets is an undertaking, but the effort is dwarfed by ongoing mutagenesis and sequencing efforts.
"This project is huge," said Dr. Robert Waterson, a former mathematician who directs the sequencing effort at Washington University in St. Louis.
The authors obtained mitochondria from a single patient's normal and cancerous cells, and subjected the DNA to a massive sequencing effort.
The costs of the sequencing effort would be recovered by marketing the sequences, which would be held in a proprietary database as intellectual property protected by patent.
Many research and clinical examples exist in the literature that show the use of melting curve analysis to obviate or complement sequencing efforts, and thus reduce costs.
No sequencing effort is redundant in this strategy.
Massive sequencing efforts are used to identify previously unknown point mutations in a variety of genes in cancer.