The recent successful mapping of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) genome by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Team India Consortium with Global Partnership has shown a novel way to do science in the Internet era. The mammoth project of global significance tapped the latent talent and potential of nearly 400 students spread across India and made the result available in an internationally accepted format. Although the TB genome was sequenced in 1998, complete mapping was not possible as only about 60 per cent of the genome was annotated. A sequenced genome is like a book containing a string of million alphabets that makes no sense; mapping arranges these alphabets into words, sentences, and chapters. The CSIR's Connect 2 Decode (C2D) project was to map the complete TB genome by extracting information on individual genes contained in hundreds of published papers and using computational extrapolation for the missing ones. The C2D project, involving students — undergraduates to start with — enlisted on a voluntary basis, was completed in just four months. Doing it the traditional way would have taken years. The message is: there is abundant young talent in India and much of it goes waste for want of opportunities and due to systemic inadequacy.
Here India can learn from China. The BGI, which used to be known as the Beijing Genomics Institute before it moved its headquarters to Shenzhen in 2007, offers a possible answer to the question of harnessing the large talent pool that may otherwise go waste. A recent editorial and a news feature in Nature looked at the possibility of China becoming the world leader in genome sequencing, thanks to the BGI model. In fact, the BGI, which depends primarily on graduates, has contributed a lot to the sequencing of many genomes, the human genome included. Tuberculosis, which mainly afflicts the poor in developing countries, is a neglected disease. Drug companies have no incentive to invest in relevant research; Rifampicin, the latest TB medicine, was discovered in the 1960s. This neglect sits ill with the fact that 1.7 million people die from TB globally every year (there are two deaths every three minutes in India alone), and the number of people with multidrug-resistant TB is increasing. It is to provide a fillip to research and drug development that the TB gene map is made freely available online under the Open Source Drug Discovery initiative of the CSIR. Anyone, including drug companies, could use the data and add to or modify them; it works on the same principle as Wikipedia.
Internet has come to the rescue of Tuberculosis patients when government has taken no interest in it. Youth who are taking interest in genome sequencing have sent a strong message and have shown them how to go about it.
Sorry, it is not a discovery. Indian scientists have only remapped the TB genome which has already been sequenced and mapped earlier. There is too much of media publicity about it.
In 1998, when they sequenced the whole tuberculosis genome, it was a major breakthrough - it was a joint effort by Pasteur Institute, France and the Sanger Center, UK. They had mapped the genome in 1998 itself and about a thousand genes were annotated. That has made research life easier. Researchers were able to gather information about each gene from the Tuberculist Website which is user friendly and gives us all details.
Later John Hopkins University came with a Website called genome, tbdb.org ; also Albert Einstein ( Dr Balasubramaniam is listed in the list of early discoverers) and Stanford Universities which provides a lot of useful information. There is another database called the comprehensive microbial resources database which gives us a lot of useful information for Tuberculosis research.
The new open source drug discovery website is not user friendly like the other existing websites. I have not understood how to use it. I shall leisurely take up a tutorial for the website when I have ample time.
Dr Usha Veeraraghavan, Birmingham UK
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