Although Celera is a private company and has no obligation to release its research, its decision not to publish the mouse data is troubling, said Larry Thompson, a spokesman for the federally funded Human Genome Project, which plans to release its own map of the mouse genome soon. If you have to pay a million dollars for a subscription, that precludes a lot of people from having access. Celera published some of its landmark human genome research in the journal Science in February after squabbling over how much data would be included. Celera was able to sequence the 15.9 billion base pairs of the mouse genome in a year using its shotgun sequencing approach. Under that method, the mouse's DNA was broken into millions of pieces, the genetic code of each piece was deciphered and the pieces were reassembled with the help of supercomputers.
Most laboratories use mice to study human diseases.