Money and Machines Fuel China's Push in Sequencing

摘要

Beijing—Yang Huanming, who directs the human genome center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' (CAS's) Institute of Genetics, is still unhappy with a deal that two Chinese laboratories struck last spring with a foreign-owned company based in China. The labs agreed to pay Shanghai GeneCore Biotechnologies $225,000 to sequence a prawn virus that threatens China's lucrative shrimp industry. They also ceded one-third of the intellectual property rights on the 300-kilobase sequence. The labs had to pay this steep price, Yang says, because they lacked the capacity to do the work in-house.