As 2011 draws to an end and we close out the final issue of Volume selleckchem Belinostat 5 of SIGS, we thought it appropriate to provide our authors, reviewers and readers with a brief update on the ��state of the journal��, to examine the evidence that supports our original idea for the need for a journal such as SIGS, and to briefly outline key plans for the future. Milestones One of the significant hurdles for any new publication is acceptance by potential authors and readers. Authors must be willing to take the risk of contributing articles to an untested journal and readers must be willing to take a risk reading and citing those articles in their own work. We have been fortunate in that SIGS became a primary outlet for articles derived from the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA) [5].

Early on it became obvious that our highly structured and standardized Short Genome Report format was well suited for the project, as it would allow comparison of descriptive information about the genomes and the source organisms. In addition, adherence to the same format for genomes derived from other sequencing projects meant that readers could easily place genomes into a consistent and predictable framework. Similarly, reviewers could easily process manuscripts and spot discrepancies that might otherwise go unnoticed. The format has proven to be quite successful and in February 2011, the 100th Short Genome Report was published in SIGS. An additional 50 Short Genome Reports were published by the end of the year. To date, all but one [6] of the Short Genome Reports was for a bacterial or archaeal genomes.

The taxonomic coverage of the Short Genome Reports published to date is presented in Table 1. Thus far, Short Genome Reports have been published for species or subspecies belonging to 16 of the 32 phyla containing types bearing validly published names. Table 1 Sequenced bBacterial and archaeal type strains having sequenced genomes with and a companion publication To better gauge progress of sequencing efforts in general, a new type of article was introduced in May 2011; a listing of genomes published outside of SIGS. The rationale for this article is to provide the community with a regularly updated list of sequenced genomes for which companion articles have been published. We were able to identify 397 of these articles that were published in 18 journals [8-11].

Excluding the genome sequences of viruses and eukaryotes, the taxonomic coverage of those papers differed somewhat from those published in SIGS, presumably because of the design of the GEBA project, which has focused on the genomes of taxonomic type strains available from public culture collections to Cilengitide maximize diversity. Nonetheless, the total number of genome articles remains relatively low (approximately 1,550) compared to the number of genome sequencing projects that either have been completed or are currently underway (11,221; GOLD).