Baylor College of Medicine has acquired a non-exclusive license to IP Genesis Inc's Comparative Sequence Assembly (CSA) technology. CSA technology helps decipher the function of the human genome by determining sequences that are conserved across species and thus stand out in the midst of the vast majority of highly variable "junk" DNA.
US Patent 6,001,562 covers the core CSA technology, including the fragment assembly of one nucleic acid by using sequence of a second, already assembled DNA sequence to guide the comparative assembly process. The Patent covers both the standard dideoxy method used in shotgun sequencing as well as hybridization-based methods employed by biochips.
Modern genome-scale "shotgun" DNA sequencing strategy involves two steps: first, determination of short randomly selected fragments of the DNA sequence; second, assembly of the fragments into contiguous sequence. The domino-like assembly is guided by overlaps of sequenced fragments. CSA technology reduces the amount of sequencing necessary for the assembly by utilizing the already assembled sequences of related organisms as a template to guide the assembly process.
It is estimated that humans share about 90 per cent of genes with other mammals, indicating a large potential of CSA to reduce the cost and increase the speed of sequencing. By comparing the genomes of different organisms, scientists can identify genome regions that play a pivotal role in the production of proteins, as well as the corresponding regulatory regions, which also tend to be conserved even across distantly related species.