Unpublished but public microbial genomes with biotechnological relevance

In the past few years, the number of microbial genome sequencing projects worldwide has rapidly increased, both of single species and microbial consortia (metagenomes). The development of several new high‐throughput sequencing platforms (Hall, 2007; Marsh, 2007), and an enormous reduction in costs, means we can expect to have thousands of complete and incomplete genomes sequences available to us in the coming years. Many of these microbial genomes are of biotechnological interest, and several have spectacular properties in relation to their growth requirements, the metabolites they produce, their potential for environmental clean‐up or survival in extreme environments. One of the ideas behind sequencing and analysis of whole genomes or substantial parts is that it will be used to enable a more targeted construction of mutant strains for improvement of industrial processes. This is in contrast to the more common procedure of production of random mutations and then screening for the desired phenotype. The sheer number of newly completed genomes, estimated at about 1 per day in 2008, makes it impossible to publish all this information in regular scientific journals. So how do we keep track of which genome sequences are known or are upcoming, and where can we find all this sequence data to do data mining and comparative genomics in search of leads for our own research on biotechnologically interesting microbes?