[Plant genome sequencing: a prelude to the study of its expression]

This report illustrates development of plant sequencing programmes. So far Arabidopsis genome has been completely sequenced and a draft of the rice genome is available. The Arabidopsis programmes stimulated sequencing of EST (expressed sequence tags) from numerous cultivated species thus creating an enormous resource. The major challenge is now to correctly annotate all the genes in Arabidopsis and find out a biological and biochemical function for each one. The availability of EST and genome sequence now allows one to analyse the expression of genes at the level of the whole genome.