The publicly funded Human Genome Project
was officially launched in 1990, and the scientific
community began to develop new strategies to enable
the large-scale mapping and sequencing that were
required to complete the project, strategies which
centered around high-throughput, highly parallel
automated sequencing. One of the benefits of this
new technology development was the completion
of several pilot genome projects, beginning with that
of the bacterium Hemophilus influenzae(Fleischmann
et al. 1995). The net effect was that by the time the
human genome had been sequenced (International
Human Genome Sequencing Consortium 2001,
Venter et al. 2001), the complete sequence was
already known for over 30 bacterial genomes plus
that of a yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), the fruit
fly, a nematode (Caenorhabditis elegans), and a plant
(Arabidopsis thaliana)