Eugene Myers, Celera's computer wizard, has shown, in the case of Drosophila, that it can.
Drosophila has about 13, 600 genes, but many of these are similar to one another.
The fruit fly, (Drosophila melanogaster), on the other hand, does not have this problem.
The human genome, however, is 20 times bigger than Drosophila's, and it also contains a lot more repeats.
The other useful thing about copia is that Drosophila is infested with it.
Drosophila's genome is only about 4% of the size of the human one.
Celera was able to work quite happily with Gerry Rubin's non-profit Drosophila Genome Project, based at the University of California, Berkeley.
Edinburgh University is considered one of the world's leading research centres on fruit flies, or drosophila as they are more formally known.
But it is not just what was achieved, but how it was done, that makes the unravelling of the Drosophila genome so significant.
The core proteome of Drosophila turns out to have 8, 065 members.
Indeed, Dr Nuzhdin and his colleagues have discovered that some laboratory-bred lines of Drosophila accumulate copia at a rate hundreds of times higher than normal.
The significance of all this for Drosophila is not yet clear.
Drosophila have been used in scientific research for more than 100 years, offering crucial insights into fields such as the genetics of ageing, diabetes and cancer.
"Our ability to grow Plasmodium in the fruit fly is especially fortunate because scientists recently determined the complete sequence of the Drosophila genome, " says Dr Shahabuddin.
The researchers also compared the genome of Drosophila with what has already been discovered about the genome of people paying particular attention to genes that are implicated in human disease.
Working with the geneticists' favourite animal, the fruit fly Drosophila, Dr Gibson has pinpointed a series of so-called cryptic variations that have no effect on a protein's structure, but can nevertheless, if the circumstances are right, have a significant effect on the individual they belong to.
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