The millennium flies in

摘要

Almost a century has passed since the first steps in the genetic analysis of the fly Drosophila melanogaster were taken by W. E. Castle at Harvard University. Another major milestone will be reached in the next few months as the completed sequence of the Drosophila genome is released, reflecting the combined efforts of the Berkeley and European Drosophila Genome Projects and Celera Genomics. Papers by Ashburner et al. and Spradling et al. in this month's Genetics preview the huge amount of work that will be involved in correlating the primary DNA sequence with genetic function. This link is essential if we are to bring full biological relevance to the flood of raw data produced by this and other projects to sequence the' genomes of 'model' organisms.