In silico infection of the human genome

Authors:
W. B. Langdon;M. J. Arno
Affiliations:
Dept. of Computer Science, University College, London, UK;Dept. of Computer Science, University College, London, UK
Venue:
EvoBIO'12 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics
Year:
2012

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Abstract

The human genetic sequence database contains DNA sequences very like those of mycoplasma bacteria. It appears such bacteria infect not only molecular Biology laboratories but their genes were picked up from contaminated samples and inserted into GenBank as if they were homo sapiens. At least one mouldy EST (Expressed Sequence Tag) has transferred from online public databases on the Internet to commercial tools (Affymetrix HG-U133 plus 2.0 microarrays). We report a second example (DA466599) and suggest there is a need to clean up genomic databases but fear current tools will be inadequate to catch genes which have jumped the silicon barrier.