Biodiversity, genomes, and DNA sequence databases

There are approximately 1.4 million organisms on this planet that have been described morphologically but there is no comparable coverage of biodiversity at the molecular level. Little more than 1% of the known species have been subject to any molecular scrutiny and eukaryotic genome projects have focused on a group of closely related model organisms. The past year, however, has seen an approximately 80% increase in the number of species represented in sequence databases and the completion of the sequencing of three prokaryotic genomes. Large-scale sequencing projects seem set to begin coverage of a wider range of the eukaryotic diversity, including green plants, microsporidians and diplomonads.