Geneticists get steamed up over public access to rice genome

Twenty top genome researchers have written to the editorial advisers of Science protesting at the way the journal occasionally publishes genome maps without requiring the authors to place the supporting sequence data in public databases. The letter is signed by such luminaries as Bob Waterston, head of genetics at Washington University in St Louis, Nobel laureate Aaron Klug of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and Michael Ashburner, former head of the European Bioinformatics Institute at Hinxton near Cambridge. In it they argue that new genome sequences should be made available in public-domain databases in line with what they term “accepted norms of the field”. “There are strong rumours in the field that Science is considering allowing the publication of papers from commercial companies on the rice and mouse genomes, without demanding the submission of the data in GenBank as a condition,” their letter says. Several sources confirm that Science intends to publish a paper by the Swiss-based agricultural biotechnology company Synnews