Ideas Fly at Gene-Finding Jamboree

Sequencing and assembly are just the first steps to completing a genome; the tough task is to pinpoint the genes and begin to figure out what they do, a process called "annotation" in the jargon of genomics. So late last fall, once the sequencing and assembly of the genome of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster was completed, computer experts and fruit fly geneticists came together at an unusual jamboree to make sense of it. By all accounts, this slam-dunk approach, which took 11 days, worked even better than expected. The results of this effort were announced in February and are published in the series of papers in this special issue.