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First Sequencing Of Plant Genome
cthugha writes: "The genome of Arabidopsis thaliana has just been completely sequenced, making it the first plant species to have its genome fully sequenced. The fact that we have animal and plant genomes now should give us greater insight into the common aspects of eukaryotic life. Nature has good coverage here. The ABC has a shorter and easier-to-digest report, but the emphasis is on the fact that Australian scientists could not participate due to lack of funding rather than on the technical details."
It was picked because
1) it has a small genome -- many plants actually have genomes longer than the human genome.
2) Arabidopsis is is a small, fast growing plant, well suited for experimentation.
It is important that people realize that sequencing a genome is a beginning and not an end. Having a genome means that more sophisticated studies can be done -- it doesn't mean that we now know everything about the plant.
There are some strange contradictions in the ABC article.
It first claims that "The sequencing of 118.7 billion base pairs of the nuclear genetic complement of a model plant is enormously significant". Then it says something near the bottom regarding "the 3.2 billion base pairs of the human genome". So what's going on here? The plant can't have more genetic information than us.
The Nature article talks about giving away 5000 CDs containing the data, and mentiones somewhere that the dataset is 120 Megabytes. So I presume that is compressed, down from the 3.2(*2) billion bits that ABC quotes. Are these numbers accurate? (And just how much information is there per base pair? Is my translation of four nucleotides to 4 possible states (2 bits) correct?)