Special issue: The sea urchin genome

Abstract

The Strongylocentrotus purpuratus Genome Project focused the attention of the sea urchin research community as nothing had ever done before. Two numbers tell the story. The first is the more than 9700 genes annotated by volunteers from this research community, guided by the energetic leadership of Erica Sodergren and George Weinstock at the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center, where the sequence was obtained and the annotation effort was organized. The second is the number of papers in this very issue, which contains 36 individual studies no one of which could or would have existed absent the genome sequence. Together with the main announcement of the genome sequence in Science and four additional genome-related papers published with it, over 40 diverse works have been called into existence with the advent of this sequence. The genome sequence provides a digital definition of the potentialities of the animal, and these papers show how many different kinds of potentiality it illuminated.