WABA Success: A Tool for Sequence Comparison between Large Genomes
- David L. Baillie1 and
- Ann M. Rose2,3
- 1Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6 Canada; 2Department of Medical Genetics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z3 Canada
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Whole-genome sequence comparisons between bacterial sequences are one thing, but try comparing two eukaryotic genomes, each containing tens or hundreds of millions of nucleotides. And try to do it on your desktop machine in your office or at home. That is what Kent and Zahler (2000) have tried, and the results are presented in this issue of Genome Research. The use of evolutionary conservation to unveil functional information contained within genomes is not new. In the case of the nematode, comparisons of Caenorhabditis elegans to its close relative Caenorhabditis briggsae go back as far as Emmons et al. (1979). Snutch (1984) made the firstC. briggsae genomic library available to the research community. These two nematodes are almost identical in morphology and development, yet their genomes have been separated for a sufficient amount of time to allow intronic and intragenic sequences to become effectively randomized, while protein-encoding sequences andcis-linked regulatory elements are conserved. C. briggsae has diverged from C. elegans in regions of unselected sequence, the middle of large introns, between genes, and at the third nucleotide of synonymous codons in genes not abundantly translated. Based on the now-outdated concept of a constant evolutionary clock, these two species were estimated to have diverged some 30–60 million years ago. These facts prompted a C. briggsae genome sequencing effort to be initiated by The Washington University Genome Sequencing Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The project was given a jump-start with the construction of a physical map (Marra et al. …
