title: Economic importance, taxonomic representation and scientific priority as drivers of genome sequencing projects.
abstract: Of the approximately two hundred sequenced plant genomes, how many and which ones were sequenced motivated by strictly or largely scientific considerations, and how many by chiefly economic, in a wide sense, incentives? And how large a role does publication opportunity play?
  
  
  
  In an integration of multiple disparate databases and other sources of information, we collect and analyze data on the size (number of species) in the plant orders and families containing sequenced genomes, on the trade value of these species, and of all the same-family or same-order species, and on the publication priority within the family and order. These data are subjected to multiple regression and other statistical analyses. We find that despite the initial importance of model organisms, it is clearly economic considerations that outweigh others in the choice of genome to be sequenced.
  
  
  
  This has important implications for generalizations about plant genomes, since human choices of plants to harvest (and cultivate) will have incurred many biases with respect to phenotypic characteristics and hence of genomic properties, and recent genomic evolution will also have been affected by human agricultural practices.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa, 585 King Edward Avenue, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada.
authors.forename: Geneviève C
authors.initials: GC
authors.lastname: Vallée
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa, 585 King Edward Avenue, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada.
authors.forename: Daniella Santos
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Muñoz
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa, 585 King Edward Avenue, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada. sankoff@uottawa.ca.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sankoff
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000191:economics; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D018745:Genome, Plant; D023281:Genomics / Q000191:economics*; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; D010944:Plants / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics*; D012044:Regression Analysis; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
keywords: Crop plants; Genome sequencing; Model organisms