A paper by Martin Aslett and Val Wood indicate that the fission yeast community is approaching 100% coverage of a GO annotation for every gene in the S. pombe genome. Only Ashbya gossypii has a smaller genome in the fungi (see a recent paper on Ashbya annotation database) and doesn’t yet have complete GO coverage. This is quite remarkable and a great dataset for studies in S. pombe and all fungi.

S. pombe taken from Paul Young’s site

My quick predictions of genes a closely related species, S. japonicus, has more than twice as many genes as S. pombe (but be over-prediction by ab initio predictors). Taken in comparison to many other fungi, S. pombe represents a streamlined and reduced genome which probably occured indepdently from reduction in the Hemiascomycetes.