Engineering in genomics-automating the Genome Center

Engineering enters genomics principally through the development of hardware and software tools or processes (operations research) to aid the biologist/geneticist to take different, more, or higher quality data. The Human Genome Project, in order to meet its goals for mapping and sequencing, is pushing to advance the state of the art in instrumentation, automation and computational biology. The focus of the project was to develop the necessary strategies, hardware, and software to complete the identification of all the genes, and obtain the sequence for the entire genome for humans and a select set of relevant organisms (mouse, fruit fly, yeast, E.coli, etc.) by the year 2006. The project has already produced a significant amount of data, is contributing to medicine and is ahead of schedule. But to keep on track, laboratories conducting research in genomics must move into a period where production data gathering is performed in a factory-like setting. The author focuses on some of the research activities of his group, which is developing automation and informatics systems for the Human Genome Project, specifically human genome centers where the production mapping and sequencing will be done. A multidisciplinary group has been assembled from personnel from the Salk Institute (a biological research organization) and General Atomics (an energy and basic sciences research company). The center is conducting research to map and sequence chromosome 11 and Giardia, for starters, and becoming more highly automated daily