title: Biodiversity, genomes, and DNA sequence databases.
abstract: There are approximately 1.4 million organisms on this planet that have been described morphologically but there is no comparable coverage of biodiversity at the molecular level. Little more than 1% of the known species have been subject to any molecular scrutiny and eukaryotic genome projects have focused on a group of closely related model organisms. The past year, however, has seen an approximately 80% increase in the number of species represented in sequence databases and the completion of the sequencing of three prokaryotic genomes. Large-scale sequencing projects seem set to begin coverage of a wider range of the eukaryotic diversity, including green plants, microsporidians and diplomonads.
authors.affiliation: National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20984, USA. leipe@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
authors.forename: D D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Leipe
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004247:DNA; D016208:Databases, Factual; D017753:Ecosystem; D016678:Genome; D006801:Humans
chemical_list: D004247:DNA