More Mouldy Data: Another mycoplasma gene jumps the silicon barrier into the human genome

Abstract

The human genome sequence database contains DNA sequences very like those of mycoplasma molds. It appears such moulds infect not only molecular Biology laboratories but were picked up by experimenters from contaminated samples and inserted into GenBank as if they were human. At least one mouldy EST (Expressed Sequence Tag) has transferred from public databases 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.