Credit: J. C. Munoz/naturepl.com

With just 1,600 giant pandas estimated to remain in the wild, Chinese scientists have led the task of immortalizing the charismatic critter's 2.25 billion base pairs of DNA, reporting their findings online in Nature last week (R. Li et al. Nature doi:10.1038/nature08696; 2009). Although it is unlikely to have a significant effect on conservation, the work is a proof-of-principle for next-generation sequencing technologies, and allows China to trumpet work involving a national animal. Indeed, one tactic for researchers hoping to win funding may be to sequence similarly patriotic symbols. "Australia has the most interesting animals in the world," says Jenny Graves, a geneticist at the Australian National University in Canberra and deputy director of the Australian Research Council's Centre for Kangaroo Genomics, who analysed sequences from the first marsupial (a South American opossum, ironically) and the duck-billed platypus. Graves says that such efforts are not just gimmicks; the kangaroo genomics project has helped researchers to work out that the SRY gene determines sex in humans and other mammals (J. W. Foster et al. Nature 359, 531–533; 1992). Other patriotic sequencing projects are detailed in .