lpetrich

The human-genome effort is officially complete, with the only leftovers being some difficult-to-sequence parts -- most likely parts with lots of short repeats.

Still no update on chimp-genome progress.

But the rhesus-monkey genome being mapped with the help of the human genome sequence, though full-scale sequencing does not seem to have started.

The chicken genome project is progressing, though coverage is only 0.5-1x out of the target of 8x of the genome.

There is still no recent update on the honeybee genome project.

A sea-urchin genome project has been started. It will be of the purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, long used as a model system, and of the green sea urchin Lytechinus variegatus as a comparison.

This close-comparison strategy is also being used for fruit flies; the sequencing of Drosophila pseudoobscura is now underway.

Looking further afield, the common bread mold Neurospora crassa has now been sequenced -- it might be interesting to see if it has any genes for a taste for bread.

And even further, the one-celled green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is being sequenced. It is rather distant from land plants; its sequence could be useful in indicating the genes for "plantishness". But among land plants themselves, the poplar-tree genome is also being sequenced; it has about 550 million base pairs, which is small by land-plant standards.

Another alga being sequenced is the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana; it is most closely related to golden and brown algae like kelp; it is relatively distant from green algae and land plants.

lpetrich

I think I'll try to give this genome business some broader perspective. The large majority of those sequenced so far are prokaryotic ones; The Genomes OnLine Database lists 122 completed and 342 in the works, for a total of 464(!)

Though the sequencing has understandably been biased toward medically- and commercially-important organisms, there is nevertheless good sampling of the diversity of these organisms. This has greatly helped origin-of-life research, since the common ancestors of these genomes' owners is thus the common ancestor of nearly all present-day life on Earth. Which makes it possible to reconstruct several of its genes and proteins.

Not nearly as many eukaryotic genomes have been done, however; not even of one-celled organisms. The above database includes only 18 complete ones, including 2 chromosomes. One reason is sheer bulk. While prokaryotic genomes range in size from 600 thousand base pairs to 5 million bp for Escherichia coli to 13.2 million bp, eukaryotic genomes range in size from the yeast genome at 12 million bp to the human genome at 3 billion bp to 300 billion bp for some amphibians and 690 billion bp for Amoeba dubia, a one-celled organism.

So we do not have nearly as much coverage of their diversity -- it's mostly animals, plants, and fungi, with a few others like the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum and the malaria bug Plasmodium falciparum. Which will make that diatom a very nice addition to the sequenced genomes.