Interest ferments in yeast genome sequence

摘要

The first complete sequence of the genome of a eukaryote, the yeast Saccha-romyces cerevisiae, will be achieved this week with the release of the final portion of the sequence by the European-led consortium of .96 laboratories — including some in the United States, Japan and Canada — involved in the Yeast Genome Project. The yeast genome is made up of 12.06 million bases distributed among 16 chromosomes, and contains around 6,000 genes. It is about 250 times smaller than the human genome. The availability of the entire yeast genome will provide unprecedented information about the architecture of a eukary-ote genome, according to Andre Goffeau of the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who is the coordinator of the Yeast Genome Project.