The world’s top moss researchers—all eight of them—were gathered in a college lecture hall in Freiburg, Germany when they found out they had been granted funding to sequence a common moss (Physcomitrella patens) genome. It was September 2004, just a year after the group had made a joint decision to increase the moss field’s visibility. The moss field wasn’t getting enough respect, the researchers believed, and they wanted to do something about it.
“Our group had decided we needed to accomplish two things to get our science into people’s living rooms: publish more high-profile papers and create concrete applications for our research,” says Ralph Quatrano, a plant biologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “To us, sequencing the genome was the best way to accomplish those goals.”
The coalition’s strategy to sequence and disseminate the genome, set up that day in a University of Freiburg lecture hall, has thrust the ...
