  Suddenly, the HGP found itself challenged by sequencing plans from the private sector. In May 1998, TIGR's Venter announced he would partner with Michael Hunkapiller's company Applied Biosystems (ABI), a division of Perkin-Elmer Corporation which manufactured sequencing machines, to form a new company which would sequence the entire genome in three short years and for a fraction of the cost. The foreseen profits rested in the construction of a “definitive” database that would outdo Genbank by integrating medical and other information with the basic sequence and polymorphisms. The company, based in Rockville, MD and later named Celera Genomics, planned to use “whole-genome shotgun” (WGS) sequencing, an approach different from the HGP's. The HGP confined the shotgun method to cloned fragments already mapped to specific chromosomal regions: these are broken down into smaller bits then amplified by bacterial clones, sequences are generated randomly by automated machines, and computational resources are used to reassemble sequence using overlapping areas of bits. Shotgunning is followed by painstaking “finishing” to fill in gaps, correct mistakes, and resolve ambiguities. What Celera was proposing for the shotgun method was to break the organism's entire genome into millions of pieces of DNA with high-frequency sound waves, sequence these pieces using hundreds of ABI's new capillary model machines, and reassemble the sequences with one of the world's largest civilian supercomputers without the assistance provided by the preliminary mapping of clones to chromosomes. When WGS sequencing was considered as a possibility by the HGP, it was rejected because of the risk that repeat sequences would yield mistakes in  reassembly.[9] But Venter by this time had successfully used the technique to sequence the 1.83 million nucleotide bases of the bacterium Hemophilus influenzae—the first free-living organism to be completely sequenced—in a year's time (Fleischmann et al.  1995).[10]