2004/10/15 by Daniela S. Gerhard, Lukas Wagner, Elise A. Feingold +97 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Molecular Biology Techniques and Applications #Gene expression and cancer classification #Biology #Complementary DNA #Genetics #cDNA library #Open reading frame #Expressed sequence tag #Gene #Computational biology #Genomic library #Genome #Peptide sequence
paper · pdf · doi:10.1101/gr.2596504
openalex publication_date 2004/10/15 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The National Institutes of Health's Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC) project was designed to generate and sequence a publicly accessible cDNA resource containing a complete open reading frame (ORF) for every human and mouse gene. The project initially used a random strategy to select clones from a large number of cDNA libraries from diverse tissues. Candidate clones were chosen based on 5'-EST sequences, and then fully sequenced to high accuracy and analyzed by algorithms developed for this project. Currently, more than 11,000 human and 10,000 mouse genes are represented in MGC by at least one clone with a full ORF. The random selection approach is now reaching a saturation point, and a transition to protocols targeted at the missing transcripts is now required to complete the mouse and human collections. Comparison of the sequence of the MGC clones to reference genome sequences reveals that most cDNA clones are of very high sequence quality, although it is likely that some cDNAs may carry missense variants as a consequence of experimental artifact, such as PCR, cloning, or reverse transcriptase errors. Recently, a rat cDNA component was added to the project, and ongoing frog (Xenopus) and zebrafish (Danio) cDNA projects were expanded to take advantage of the high-throughput MGC pipeline.