The Anopheles gambiae Genome Project
The Anopheles gambiae Genome Project formally was initiated in March 2001 at a meeting at the Institut Pasteur (Paris). Representatives of the An. gambiae research community, sequencing centres and funding agencies decided to carry out a project aimed at determining the complete sequence of this most important malaria vector. Using granst from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to Celera Genomics, and from the French Gevernment to the Institut Pasteur and Genoscope, as well as additional smaller grants from various sourcesto individual laboratories, the actual sequencing was immediately initiated, most of it being carried out by Celera Genomics and Genoscope. Under the coordination of the UNDP/World Bank/World Health Organization Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases ( TDR ).
The project was completed in its first phase in the summer of 2002, and the results were published in a special issue of Science in October 2002.
The Anopheles gambiae Genome Project is now coordinated by the International Anopheles Genome Executive Committee (IAGEC), which is, as the "owner" of the sequences that are publicly available at the Genbank/EMBL/DDBL public databases, is responsible for the "maintenance" of the information and for questions relating to newer versions, finishing, etc. The members of the IAGEC are:
The Anopheles genome sequence is maintained by the ENSEMBL team (PI: Dr. Ewan Birney) and it can be accessed at its "Mosquito Genome Browser ".
In addition to that, a CD containing the whole genome sequence as well as analysis tools for browsing the data off-line has been developed by a team of labs (AnoBase, ENSEMBL, Notre Dame, PlasmoDB) in collaboration with WHO/TDR and Science.
It can be obtained free of charge by writing to anobase-comments[at]imbb.forth.gr or by downloading directly a compressed copy (154M) from here