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IT’S been called the “Rosetta stone” that will unlock the secrets of the human genome. And now it has been officially unveiled.

The long-awaited draft sequence of the mouse genome was published this week in Nature, just two years after a global Mouse Genome Consortium of publicly funded institutes set to work to unravel the code of “Black 6”, a common lab strain. Private rival Celera said it assembled its mouse genome in April 2001, but so far it has published details of only one chromosome.

Gene sleuths have coveted the mouse genome as an instant reference manual. Although the…

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