With all the work I've been doing in metagenomics, it's nice to be reminded that I still do some of the non-meta type -- yes, I was involved in the P. chrysogenum project, and the paper (and supplemental) is now up in Nature Biotechnology's Advance Publications page prior to the print publication.We've actually gotten a little bit of press -- the BBC has a brief article here.
P. chrysogenum is one of those obvious genomes people are surprised to learn haven't been sequenced yet (well until now). While a "pure" biologist may yawn and say "it's just another filamentous fungus -- haven't we sequenced those already?", there is real practical potential for metabolic engineering of new antibiotics from this genome given that researchers have been doing work on the bug for over 60 years. Besides, the genome wasn't completely uninteresting even from the viewpoint of basic science -- we snuck in a fairly controversial fungal phylogeny in figure 2 -- and I stand by it as we used far more data in our alignments than in previous studies.
[updated links to final published version 10/14/08]
