lpetrich

I've found a page that contains <a href="http://www.genome.gov/page.cfm?pageID=10002154" target="_blank">the winning proposals to the NHGRI for the next genomes to sequence</a>. These genomes will be taken up by the major sequencing labs after they finish up the human, mouse, and rat genomes, which should be later this year.

The highest priority is:

Chicken
Chimpanzee
Fungi (17 species)
Honeybee
Sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus)
The ciliate protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila

Following behind is

The ciliate protozoan Oxytricha trifallax
Rhesus monkey

A common rationale was economic or medical importance, as productive species or as disease/pest species; however, the rationales often included the value of some species as a model species and for elucidating aspects of evolution.

Chimps got the nod as the closest species to our species; the proposal listed some medical conditions common in our species, but not so common in chimps, and speculated about loss of genes for useful features as a result of genetic bottlenecks in our ancestry.

Rhesus monkeys are much more commonly used as an approximation of our species in biomedical research, but they are also about 5 times as genetically distant as chimps.

Chickens are the most-studied of birds, at least on an organismal and genetic level, and of obvious importance as a food source. They were advertised as being non-mammalian but closer than fish, some of whose genomes are being sequenced (fugu pufferfish, zebrafish).

The sea urchin is advertised as being interesting from an evolutionary standpoint; the echinoderms, along with the hemichordates, are the closest non-chordates to Chordata -- and that species has been used as a model system for decades.

The honeybee is interesting as not only providing another insect example, in addition to the mosquito genomes in the works, but also on account of their complex society -- which is run largely on instinct. How genes translate into instincts is poorly-understood, but knowing what's in the genome helps solve the problem from the gene end.

Another reason honeybees are proposed is their strategies for resistance to various diseases and parasites and pests. Living in closely-packed groups is the ideal situation for the spread of troublemaking organisms, and honeybees have various strategies for coping with them.

And yet another reason is understanding how the differences between queens and workers is produced -- queens can live 100 times as long as workers, and the two castes are otherwise specialized in different directions in a variety of ways.

Some of the fungi are proposed for exploring how multicellularity works, since fungal multicellularity is likely an independent invention, and possibly a multiple one. One thing that may help is that most fungal multicellularity is fairly simple, with the possible exception of the big fruiting bodies of some fungi, a.k.a. mushrooms.

The protozoa are proposed mostly as model systems, and as examples of oddball gene handling.

I wonder what creationists must think. Especially as they believe in a big genetic-bottleneck event -- Noah's Flood.