LARGE-SCALE SEQUENCING OF PLANT GENOMES

The large number of ESTs generated for Arabidopsis and rice in recent years now act as an important complement to whole genome sequencing pr ojects. The Arabidopsis Genome Initiative has begun a coordinated effo rt to sequence the entire genome and, as a result, increasing numbers of large sequence entries can be found in the public databases; in add ition, the mitochondrial genome of Arabidopsis has been completely seq uenced. Genome sequencing studies and the public sequence databases ha ve begun to influence the direction of diverse areas of research from physiology to evolution.