The Drosophila Genome: So That's What it Looks Like!

When the participants in the 41st Annual Drosophila Research Conference returned to their labs after the meeting, their working landscape had changed. The annotated sequence of the euchromatic Drosophila melanogaster genome had become public information as a result of the unprecedented collaboration between the private Celera Genomics company and the public Drosophila Genome Project consortium (Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, BDGP [8]; European Drosophila Genome Project, EDGP [4]; Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Center [9]; FlyBase [5]). The afternoon of 23 March saw more than 1200 conference participants gathered for a landmark Genome Workshop that discussed the sequencing and annotation projects.