[
Science,
1998]
This special issue of Science celebrates a landmark in biology:: determination of the essentially complete DNA sequence of an animal genome. The animal is a small invertebrate, the nematode (or roundworm) Caenorhabditis elegans, and the sequence consists of about 97 million base pairs of DNA, approximately one-thirtieth the number in the human genome. Nonetheless, the information content is enormous - eight times that of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the only other eukaryote with a sequenced genome.