Celera Genomics

Celera Corporation

Type	Subsidiary
Traded as	NASDAQ: CRA
Industry	Technology
Founded	1998
Headquarters	Alameda, California, United States
Key people	William G. Green, Chairman, Kathy P Ordonez, President, Craig Venter, Founder
Products	Scientific & Technical Instruments
Number of employees	554
Website	www.celera.com

Celera is a subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics which focuses on genetic sequencing and related technologies. It was founded in 1998 as a business unit of Applera, spun off into an independent company in 2008, and finally acquired by Quest Diagnostics in 2011.

Originally headquartered in Rockville, Maryland (relocated to Alameda, California), it was established in May 1998 by PE Corporation (later renamed to Applera), with Dr. J. Craig Venter from The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) as its first president. While at TIGR, Venter and Hamilton Smith led the first successful effort to sequence an entire organism's genome, that of the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium. Celera was formed for the purpose of generating and commercializing genomic information. Its stock is a of Applera, along with the tracking stock of Applera's larger Applied Biosystems Group business unit.

Celera sequenced the human genome at a fraction of the cost of the public project, approximately $3 billion of taxpayer dollars versus about $300 million of private funding. However, a significant portion of the human genome had already been sequenced when Celera entered the field, and thus Celera did not incur any costs with obtaining the existing data, which was freely available to the public from GenBank. Celera's use of the shotgun strategy spurred the public HGP to change its own strategy, leading to a rapid acceleration of the public effort.

Critics of initial efforts by Celera Genomics to hold back data from sections of genome they sequenced for commercial exploitation felt that it would retard progress in science as a whole. These critics pointed to the open access policy for gene sequences from the publicly funded Human Genome Project. Later, the company changed their policy and made their sequences available for non-commercial use but set a maximum threshold for amount of sequence data that a researcher could download at any given time.