The Sclerotinia sclerotiorum sequencing project was funded by the National Research Initiative, which is within the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Cooperative State Research Education and Extension Service, and reviewed through the USDA/NSF Microbial Genome Sequencing Project. Our strategy involves Whole Genome Shotgun (WGS) sequencing, in which sequence from the entire genome is generated using paired end reads from plasmids and Fosmids and assembled using Arachne (Batzoglou et al. 2002, Jaffe et al. 2003). The rapid availability of this sequence in an annotated form will immediately promote discovery of genes and potential anti-fungal targets, permit reconstruction of pathways, provide sequence-anchored clone paths for use in genetic and functional studies, and enable comparative genomic approaches to analysis.