Celera Corporation facts for kids
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| Subsidiary | |
| Traded as | NASDAQ: CRA |
| Industry | Technology |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Headquarters | Alameda, California, United States |
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Key people
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| Products | Scientific & Technical Instruments |
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Number of employees
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554 |
| Parent | Quest Diagnostics |
Celera Corporation was a company that worked with genetics and DNA sequencing. It was a part of Quest Diagnostics. Celera started in 1998 as a division of a company called Applera. It became its own company in 2008. Later, in 2011, Quest Diagnostics bought Celera.
Contents
Celera's Story
Celera Corporation began in May 1998. It was first located in Rockville, Maryland, but later moved to Alameda, California. Dr. J. Craig Venter was its first president. He was a scientist from The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR).
What is a Genome?
Before Celera, Dr. Venter and Hamilton O. Smith did something amazing. They were the first to successfully read the entire genome of a living thing. A genome is like a complete instruction book for an organism. It tells a living thing how to grow and work. They read the genome of a tiny bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae.
Celera was created to find and use information from genomes. This information could then be used for new products or discoveries.
Sequencing the Human Genome
Celera became famous for its work on the Human Genome Project (HGP). This project aimed to read the entire human instruction book. The public HGP was a huge effort funded by governments. Celera, a private company, also worked on it.
Celera used about $300 million of private money. The public HGP used about $3 billion of taxpayer money. Celera's method was called shotgun sequencing. This method helped the public HGP speed up its work. The public project finished in 2003, earlier than planned.
Sharing Genetic Information
At first, Celera wanted to keep some of its genome data private. They hoped to use it for business. But many scientists believed that all gene sequences should be available to everyone. This idea is called open access. The public Human Genome Project shared all its data freely.
Later, Celera changed its rules. They made their sequences available for non-commercial use. This meant researchers could use the data for science, but not to make money. However, there was a limit on how much data a researcher could download at one time.
Books About Celera
The story of Celera and its competition with the public Human Genome Project is in some books. One book is The Genome War by James Shreeve. Another is The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome by Nobel laureate Sir John Sulston. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow also wrote about Celera in his 2005 book A Machine to Make a Future.
Genomes Celera Sequenced
Celera Genomics helped sequence the genomes of several important organisms:
- Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly)
- Human, mostly that of Craig Venter himself
- Anopheles gambiae (mosquito)
- Mouse
See also
In Spanish: Celera Genomics para niños
