TUBERCULOSIS: genome research

Launched with much fanfare in September 2008 in the presence of Kapil Sibal, then India's science minister, the 1.5-billion-rupee (US$32-million) OSDD project aims to speed drug discovery — primarily against tuberculosis — by giving researchers an open platform for sharing their work through the Internet.
But controversy has followed Brahmachari's highly publicized announcement on 11 April that the project has comprehensively mapped, compiled and verified the genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. In particular, many researchers dispute Brahmachari's claim that the project has made the annotated genome publicly available "for the first time" — they note that other institutions, including the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, already host publicly available annotated versions of the bacterium's genome.
Press reports after the announcement quoted Brahmachari, who is also the director-general of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) — one of the country's largest R&D organizations, as saying that the work has already yielded a molecule with potential as a drug to treat tuberculosis and that he hoped it would be ready to enter clinical trials within 18–24 months. Brahmachari refused Nature 's requests for an interview, but project director Zakir Thomas, whom Brahmachari said would respond on his behalf, says that "Brahmachari was misquoted".
Most of the concerns surrounding the work centre on the revelation that the massive task of re-annotating the M. tuberculosis genome — which contains around 4,000 genes — to link genes to their function, was completed in four months by about 400 college students with the guidance of senior OSDD project team members. And although the data from the project are available online, the team has yet to publish them in a peer-reviewed journal.
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100609/full/news.2010.285.html?s=news_rss