THE GENOME OF CAENORHABDITIS-ELEGANS

The physical map of the 100-Mb Caenorhabditis elegans genome consists of 17,500 cosmids and 3500 yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs). A tota l of 22.5 Mb has been sequenced, with the remainder expected by 1998. A further 15.5 Mb of unfinished sequence is freely available online: b ecause the areas sequenced so far are relatively gene rich, about half the 13,000 genes can now be scanned. More than a quarter of the genes are represented by expressed sequence tags (ESTs), All information pe rtaining to the genome is publicly available in the ACeDB data base.