Plant sequence completed

In the 14 December Nature the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI) announces the completion of the first plant genome sequence. The published sequence covers 115.4 megabases of the estimated 125-megabase genome of the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana, a model plant. The sequence contains 25,498 genes encoding proteins from 11,000 families. The gene number is high for two reasons: an ancient diploidization, and the presence of 1,528 tandem arrays (containing 4,140 individual genes), which probably arose after unequal crossing-over events during recombination.

After publication of the sequence of Arabidopsis chromosome 2 and chromosome 4 last year, the new reports cover the remaining sequences of chromosomes 1 (Theologis et al., Nature 2000, 408:816-820), 3 (Salanoubat et al., Nature 2000, 408:820-822) and 5 (Tabata et al., Nature 2000, 408:823-826). There is also a lengthy analysis of the whole sequence by the entire AGI team (Nature...