Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Perhaps no other field of research has been more energized by the application of genomic technology than the field of microbiology. Five years ago, The Institute for Genomic Research published the first complete genome sequence for a free-living organism, Haemophilus influenzae (1). Since then, 27 more microbial genome sequences (2-28) and 3 lower eukaryotic chromosome sequences (29-31) have been published, and at least three times that many sequencing projects are under way. Several important human pathogens are included: Helicobacter pylori (7,19), Borrelia burgdorferi (12), Treponema pallidum (16), Mycobacterium tuberculosis (15), Rickettsia prowazekii (18), and Chlamydia species (17,20); the simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium (2); the model organisms, Escherichia coli (8) and Bacillus subtilis (10); Aquifex aeolicus (13) and Thermotoga maritima (21), two thermophilic bacterial species that may represent some of the deepest branching members of the bacterial lineage; five representatives of the archaeal domain (3,9,11, 14,28); and the first eukaryote, Saccaromyces cerevisiae (6).