First Author

Credit: BROAD INST.

These days, sequencing a genome requires almost as much managerial acumen as it does scientific skill. Many projects now work on multiple genomes because researchers want to answer deep biological and evolutionary questions straight away. But this can involve a large number of groups and so entails a lot of careful coordination.

James Galagan, associate director of microbial genome analysis and annotation at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, understands this balancing act all too well. He is first author on a paper that examines the sequence of the fungus Aspergillus nidulans (see page 1105), and was a contributing author to papers that reveal the sequence of two related organisms: A. fumigatus (see page 1151) and A. oryzae (see page 1157). Nature asked him about the art of both genomic science and management.

Three genomes must have required a huge effort. How many groups pitched in?

Really there were three major communities involved — one for each fungi. But each community spanned multiple institutions and countries. The medical community oversaw A. fumigatus because it's a pathogen. The biotech community was interested in A. oryzae because it is used to make sake and soy sauce — it's almost the national fungus of Japan. And A. nidulans is more of a ‘model organism’, so it attracted people who were interested in basic biology.

How difficult was it to manage this work?

I was the contact person for organizing the comparative analysis, and so I worked with a large subset of each group. First, we decided what we could learn from the sequences alone. Then we used a series of conference calls to organize things. It's always hard to find a time when everyone can phone in when the groups are in Japan, the United States and Europe. The last stage was about looking for the key finding — the surprise — because a lot of the results were expected.

What was the benefit of doing three related genomes more or less at once?

It allowed us to look at genome evolution. When you compare how genomes have changed, the information is in front of you. You also have the power to identify parts that have been conserved.

Has the bar been raised with each published sequence?

The bar is much higher than it was several years ago. It's no longer enough to sequence a genome, catalogue the genes and come up with diagrams of signalling and so forth. We're expecting to get much more. We're expecting to find things that change how people look at the organism.