Genome Update: proteome comparisons.

Genomes of the month Four new genomes will be discussed in this month’s Genome Update. The list of organisms given in Table 1 includes an archaeon, two bacteria and an eukaryote. Two genomes will only be mentioned briefly. The protozoan Cryptosporidium hominis causes gastroenteritis and diarrhoea around the world. Like the Cryptosporidium parvum genome (Abrahamsen et al., 2004), that of C. hominis has undergone genome reduction to a size of about 9 Mbp, and both genomes have slightly fewer than 4000 genes (Xu et al., 2004). Photobacterium profundum is a member of the vibrio group (Thompson et al., 2004), and its genome consists of two chromosomes and one plasmid (Table 1). At the time of writing, the GenBank files have been deposited, but the genome report has not yet been published. One very interesting feature of this genome is the larger number of rRNAs.