The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae was the ยฎrst organism from which a chromosome was sequenced and the ยฎrst eukaryote to have its genome completely sequenced. As I write, the genome sequence of the ยฎssion yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe is being completed and this will probably be just the fourth complete eukaryotic genome sequence. Yeast (the journal) has played an important role in both the sequencing and post-sequencing phases of genomics through its Sequencing Reports and Functional Analysis Reports. Therefore, it seems appropriate that Yeast is acting as `midwife' to a new journal, Comparative and Functional Genomics (CFG), that will meet the demands of the postsequencing era of genomics. However, CFG will not deal with just the yeasts and fungi, but with organisms throughout the evolutionary range. Thus, CFG has Section Editors for the bacteria, for yeasts, for ยฎlamentous fungi, for plants, for Drosophila, for C. elegans, for the zebra ยฎsh, for mouse, and for humans. Moreover, it also has Section Editors to handle all of the major technologies involved in comparative and functional genomics: bioinformatics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics.
I gave a lecture on functional genomics at a British university recently, where the departmental Chairman, at the end of my talk, remarked that he thought he had `seen the future, and it's complicated'. I took that to be a comment, not on my limited didactic powers, but on the fact that functional genomics is an open-ended ยฎeld of study that requires a large number of different