GeneSweep

Last updated
GeneSweep: Gene Sweepstake
DateMay 10, 2000 – May 30, 2003 (2000-05-10 – 2003-05-30)
Duration3 years and 20 days
Venue Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Ensembl genome database project
Location Global
Type Sweepstake
Scientific wager
Theme Genetics
Genomics
MotiveEstimating total number of genes in the human genome
Organised by Ewan Birney
David Stewart
Participants460 bets [1]
Awards$1,200 prize
Website www.ensembl.org/genesweep.html [2]

GeneSweep or Gene Sweepstake was a sweepstake and scientific wager for scientists to bet on the total number of genes in the human genome. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] The sweepstake was started at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory conference in 2000. [2] [9] [10] [11] [12] Initially, bets could be placed for $1, which was raised to $5 in 2001 and to $20 in 2002. [2] The cost of placing a bet increased significantly because later participants were expected to have much more accurate information available to inform their guesses. [13] By May 23, 2000, 228 bets had been placed, with the average number of predicted genes among them being 62,598. [14]

Contents

Winning bets in 2003

On May 30, 2003, Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute, who had organized the pool, [2] announced the winner: Lee Rowen of the Institute for Systems Biology. [15] Rowen had guessed that the human genome would contain 25,947 genes, which was the closest to the estimated number of 24,847 given by the Ensembl genome database project. In addition to being the winning guess, this was also the lowest of the more than 460 bets that were placed. [1] Rowen split the $1,200 prize pool with Paul Dear of the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Olivier Jaillon of Genoscope. Rowen credited Jean Weissenbach of Genoscope with convincing her that the true number of human genes would be relatively low. All three winners shared the prize because they were the only betters who guessed under 30,000, and Birney was certain that the total number of genes was less than that. [16] The sweepstakes had always been planned to end in 2003, because Birney had expected that Ensembl would have completed counting the number of human genes by then. Once it became clear that they would need more time to arrive at an exact number, Birney initially planned on extending the sweepstakes for five more years. However, David Stewart convinced Birney to choose a winner by pointing out that the rules specified that a winner had to be chosen in 2003, with no exceptions. Birney noted that, though the exact number was still unknown, there was no doubt that the number of human genes was much less than 26,000, and he announced that 21,000 was the best estimate in a 2003 talk. [17]

Ongoing debate after 2003

As of 2018 there is continuing debate amongst scientists about the total number of genes in the human genome, with most estimates ranging from 19,000 and 22,000. [18] [19]

Related Research Articles

A scientific wager is a wager whose outcome is settled by scientific method. It typically consists of an offer to pay a certain sum of money on the scientific proof or disproof of some currently-uncertain statement. Some wagers have specific date restrictions for collection, but many are open. Wagers occasionally exert a powerful galvanizing effect on society and the scientific community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ewan Birney</span> English businessman

John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Haussler</span> American bioinformatician

David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard M. Durbin</span> British computational biologist

Richard Michael Durbin is a British computational biologist and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Schimmel</span> American chemist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sean Eddy</span> American professor at Harvard University

Sean Roberts Eddy is Professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology and of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics, computational biology and biological sequence analysis. As of 2016 projects include the use of Hidden Markov models in HMMER, Infernal Pfam and Rfam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurence Hurst</span>

Laurence Daniel Hurst is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Bath and the director of the Milner Centre for Evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard M. Myers</span> American geneticist and biochemist (born 1954)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diethard Tautz</span> German biologist and geneticist (born 1957)

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Donna R. Maglott is a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information known for her research on large-scale genomics projects, including the mouse genome and development of databases required for genomics research.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kenneth H. Wolfe</span> Irish geneticist and academic

Kenneth Henry Wolfe is an Irish geneticist and professor of genomic evolution at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manolis Kellis</span> Greek-born computational biologist

Manolis Kellis is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the area of Computational Biology and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is the head of the Computational Biology Group at MIT and is a Principal Investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christophe Dessimoz</span>

Christophe Dessimoz is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professor at the University of Lausanne, Associate Professor at University College London and a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology. Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, along with Ron Appel.

Matthew Edward Hurles is director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and an honorary professor of Human Genetics and Genomics at the University of Cambridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernard Dujon</span> French geneticist

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Katherine Snowden Pollard is the Director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. She was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2020 and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2021 for outstanding contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics.

Zhiping Weng is the Li Weibo Professor of biomedical research and chair of the program in integrative biology and bioinformatics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She was awarded Fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2020 for outstanding contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics.

References

  1. 1 2 Pearson, Helen (2003). "Geneticists play the numbers game in vain". Nature. 423 (6940): 576. Bibcode:2003Natur.423..576P. doi: 10.1038/423576a . ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   12789304.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Birney, Ewan (2000). "Gene Sweepstake ("Genesweep")". ensembl.org. Archived from the original on 2000-08-16.
  3. ↑ Anon (2002). "Top genome researchers gather at Cold Spring Harbor". cshl.edu. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
  4. ↑ Zhang, Jianzhi (2007). "The drifting human genome". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (51): 20147–20148. Bibcode:2007PNAS..10420147Z. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0710524104 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   2154398 . PMID   18093959.
  5. ↑ Choi, Charles Q (2003). "Who'll sweep the Gene Sweepstake?". Genome Biology. 4: spotlight-20030430-01. doi: 10.1186/gb-spotlight-20030430-01 . ISSN   1465-6906.
  6. ↑ Leach, Martin (2004). "Gene Expression Informatics". Gene Expression Profiling. Methods in Molecular Biology. Vol. 258. pp. 153–166. doi:10.1385/1-59259-751-3:153. ISBN   1-59259-751-3. PMID   14970462.
  7. ↑ Giles, Jim (2002). "Wanna bet?". Nature. 420 (6914): 354–355. doi: 10.1038/420354a . ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   12459753. S2CID   4356650.
  8. ↑ Pennisi, Elizabeth (2003). "Bioinformatics: Gene Counters Struggle to Get the Right Answer". Science. 301 (5636): 1040–1041. doi:10.1126/science.301.5636.1040. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   12933991. S2CID   5227212.
  9. ↑ Semple, Colin (2000). "Gene prediction: the end of the beginning". Genome Biology. 1 (2): reports4012.1. doi: 10.1186/gb-2000-1-2-reports4012 .
  10. ↑ Harris, Richard F. (2000). "The gene pool". Current Biology . 10 (14): R506. Bibcode:2000CBio...10.R506H. doi: 10.1016/S0960-9822(00)00590-X . ISSN   0960-9822. PMID   10899015. S2CID   20616324.
  11. ↑ Anon (2000). "The nature of the number". Nature Genetics . 25 (2): 127–128. doi: 10.1038/75946 . ISSN   1061-4036. PMID   10835616.
  12. ↑ Smaglik, Paul (2000). "Researchers take a gamble on the human genome". Nature. 405 (6784): 264. doi: 10.1038/35012771 . ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   10830930.
  13. ↑ Anon (2000). "Gambling on the Genome". Journal of the National Cancer Institute . 92 (17): 1373. doi: 10.1093/jnci/92.17.1373 . PMID   10974068.
  14. ↑ Wade, Nicholas (2000). "Scientists Cast Bets on Human Genes; A Winner Will Be Picked in 2003". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-10-21.
  15. ↑ Pearson, Helen (2003). "Human gene number wager won". Nature. doi:10.1038/news030602-3. ISSN   0028-0836.
  16. ↑ Pennisi, Elizabeth (2003). "Low Numbers Win GeneSweep Pool". sciencemag.org. Science . Retrieved 2019-10-21.
  17. ↑ Wade, Nicholas (2003). "Gene Sweepstakes Ends, but Winner May Well Be Wrong". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-10-21.
  18. ↑ Willyard, Cassandra (2018). "New human gene tally reignites debate". Nature . 558 (7710): 354–355. Bibcode:2018Natur.558..354W. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05462-w . ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   29921859.
  19. ↑ Pertea, Mihaela; Salzberg, Steven L (2010). "Between a chicken and a grape: estimating the number of human genes". Genome Biology . 11 (5): 206. doi: 10.1186/gb-2010-11-5-206 . ISSN   1465-6906. PMC   2898077 . PMID   20441615.
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