“The broad brush strokes of microbial diversity are not adequately represented in that first thousand,” says Stephen Giovannoni, a microbiologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “It’s absolutely important that we sequence more.”Enter the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea, a project spearheaded by the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, California, which aims to sequence the genomes of another thousand or so microbes.The vast majority of microbial species that have had their genomes decoded come from just three groups and were chosen because of their medical or environmental importance. The encyclopedia’s researchers are picking microbes from many more branches of the evolutionary tree of life.
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