Chapter 11 – Genome Sequences of Saccharomycotina: Resources and Applications in Phylogenomics

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews the data that are currently available in yeast comparative genomics, and discusses how taxonomists can access and make use of these data. Genomes can be sequenced to various levels of completion. The “gold standard” is a sequence that spans every chromosome from telomere to telomere, with no gaps or ambiguities. The genome sequence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae comes close to meeting this standard, but even for this species it has proved impossible (with current technology) to determine the complete sequence of the rDNA locus. An alternative strategy in genomics is whole-genome shotgun (WGS) sequencing without further finishing. This strategy saves much time and expense, but loses out in terms of the completeness of the information obtained. The shotgun sequencing process involves “assembling” the raw data, by finding overlaps between individual sequence reads of random fragments of genomic DNA to form larger “contigs” of contiguous genomic sequence data.