Instead of just piling up genome data on humans and key model organisms, the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, California, will soon be decoding new DNA sequences that could help answer key evolution and development questions. It will devote about 60% of its sequencing capacity--about 2.5 billion bases per month--to an array of unsequenced organisms that could range from the leech to the armadillo. "Everything is on the table," says JGI evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Boore, as investigators in fields from geology to developmental biology are invited to apply.
Meanwhile, the mouse genome will be finished and should be as complete as the human one. And draft blueprints of the chimp, rat, honeybee, and a fruit fly called Drosophila pseudoobscura will soon follow, as will those of pathogens including the bugs that cause sleeping sickness and Chagas disease.
