Lecture 26 Jan 2001 Per Kraulis

The genomes

2. The current genomes

The list of currently determined genomes is growing rapidly, probably at an exponential rate. This means that it is beginning to be difficult to keep updated. Luckily, there are a number of web sites that (try to) keep track of the status of the various genome projects. Here are links to some of them:

• TIGR Microbial Database, published microbial genomes, and projects in progress. Lists maintained by TIGR, The Institute for Genomics Research. This institute was founded by Craig Venter, and was the first to sequence complete genome for a bacterium, Haemophilus influenzae, in 1995.
• EBI Completed Genomes web site, links, resources. Contains sequence data for organelles (mitochondria), phages and viruses.
• Genome Monitoring Table by Stephan Beck and Peter Sterk at EBI.
• NCBI Genomic Biology web site, with links and search resources.
• GOLD (Genomes OnLine Database), maintained by the company Integrated Genomics, which is selling annotation services for companies that have in-house genome projects (primarily bacterial genomes).

There are a number of web sites that focus on data for specific genomes. Usually, these sites contain more data than just the DNA sequence of the genome, such as predicted transcripts (ORFs, Open Reading Frames), verified transcripts and tentative identifications or classifications of the predicted proteins.

Here is a table of a few complete genomes, with information and links. Please note that the number of ORFs given below for each genome is tentative. The numbers depend on the exact procedure used to identify known genes and predict previously unknown genes (see the section Analysing a genome).