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Colors of Chemistry - March 2010
Each year, the Chicago River is dyed green to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day in downtown Chicago. Members of the Journeymen Plumbers Local Union 130 are responsible for mixing dye into the river, but the brilliant green hue can be credited to the work of German chemist and Nobel Prize winner Adolf von Baeyer. In 1871, Baeyer was the first to synthesize fluorescein, the xanthene dye used for the inaugural dyeing of the river in 1961. Although the union has since replaced the dye with an environmentally friendly but undisclosed alternative, fluorescein remains one of the most important organic dyes used in biomedical research. In fact, the discovery that fluorescein could be chemically coupled to nucleic acids was instrumental in the development of automated DNA sequencing, a technology that enabled the historic deciphering of the human genome in 2001. Related Records from CAplus2001:130334 The sequence of the human genome. Venter, J. C.; Adams, M. D.; Myers, E. W.; Li, P. W.; Mural, R. J.; Sutton, G. G.; Smith, H. O.; Yandell, M.; Evans, C. A.; Holt, R. A.; et al. Science 2001, 291 (5507), 1304-1351. A 2.91-billion base pair (bp) consensus sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome was generated by the whole-genome shotgun sequencing method. The 14.8-billion bp DNA sequence was generated over 9 mo from 27,271,853 high-quality sequence reads (5.11-fold coverage of the genome) from both ends of plasmid clones made from the DNA of 5 individuals. Two assembly strategies - a whole-genome assembly and a regional chromosome assembly - were used, each combining sequence data from Celera and the publicly funded genome effort. The public data, were shredded into 550-bp segments to create a 2.9-fold coverage of those genome regions that had been sequenced, without including biases inherent in the cloning and assembly procedure used by the publicly funded group. This brought the effective coverage in the assemblies to 8-fold, reducing the no. and size of gaps in. the final assembly over what would be obtained with 5.11-fold coverage. The 2 assembly strategies yielded very similar results that largely agree with independent mapping data. The assemblies effectively cover the euchromatic regions of the human chromosomes... 2001:154069 Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome. Lander, E. S.; Linton, L. M.; Birren, B.; Nusbaum, C.; Zody, M. C.; Baldwin, J.; Devon, K.; Dewar, K.; Doyle, M.; FitzHugh, W.; et al. Nature 2001, 409 (6822), 860-921. The human genome holds an extraordinary trove of information about human development, physiol., medicine, and evolution. The results of an international collaboration to produce and make freely available a draft sequence of the human genome are now reported. An initial anal. of the data is also presented, describing some of the insights that can be gleaned from the sequence. Related Structure from CAS REGISTRY
Additional InformationView more Colors of Chemistry articles or learn about our new digital calendars. Updated: 2/1/2010 4:56:45 PM
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