The genome of S. cerevisiae was the first completely sequenced from a eukaryote. It was released in 1996. Article Life with 6000 Genes
What kind of obstacles poses mitochondrial DNA for sequencing?
Hi Miroslav,
good observation, maybe someone legislated that the genome was more important than the mitochondrial DNA, even in SC on which everybody knows that glucose metabolism and therefore use of mitochondria have a key function in this cell.
fred
This is a classic paper, but very old for genomics. Sequencing technology was new, very slow, and very expensive, shotgun-style assembly was just invented, and we weren't even considering sequencing the human genome yet.
There are no particular obstacles to sequencing mitochondrial genomes. In fact, they are much easier to sequence than nuclear genomes since mitochondrial genomes are orders of magnitude smaller than the nuclear genome, exist in a higher copy number in cells, and don't degrade as quickly in ancient samples.
My guess is they omitted the mitochondria genome because they considered the nuclear genome more important and it's possible to grow yeast that don't have mitochondria so it was practical to leave it out of their study.
Actually the mitochondrial genome is co-sequenced when the nuclear genome is sequenced. We sequenced two yeast strains by isolating the genomic DNA and we could assemble the entire mitochondrial genome sequence of both strains from the genomic reads. Some of the contigs assembled in the above work must be mitochondrial but we do not know why they ignored them.
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