Abstract
The past 10 years have seen a radical transformation of biology, including plant sciences. 1997 marked the beginning of large-scale genome-level sequencing, with the completion of the genome sequence of brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It seems difficult to believe today that Nature devoted an entire supplement to this achievement, with a separate article about each of the nine chromosomes that had not been previously published! By that time, sequencing of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome was already well under way; a major milestone was the publication in 1998 of 1.9 Mb of contiguous genomic sequence from chromosome 4, soon followed by sequences of the entire chromosomes 2 and 4 in 1999, all culminating in the release of the remaining three chromosomes along with an analysis of the entire genome sequence in 2000 [1]. Since then, three more land plants genomes have been announced, those of rice, the first monocot and a key crop plant; of poplar, the first tree; and, very recently, grape, the first dicot crop. In addition, several more genomes are available in draft form, such as sorghum and the genomes of non-vascular plants, including Chlamydomonas, a green alga, Physcomitrella, a moss, and Selaginella, a fern and more genome drafts are on the way (http://www.jgi.doe.gov/).
