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.
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.
[...] Uncharacterized Yeast genes? Poor Yeast – so many more genes have no known function, while S. pombe has nearly 100% coverage in functional annotation. I’ll also point out that the 1000 genes refers to protein-coding [...]
[...] Approaching 100% coverage for GO assignments in S.pombe Tags: comparative genomics, draft sequence, genome, genome sequences, japonicus, model system, ncbi, NIH, octosporus, Pneumocystis, pombe, schizosaccharomyces [...]