Introduction

This directory was made possible by a unique international collaboration between the 633 scientists whose names appear below. It represents both the first published description of the complete sequence of most chromsomes from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and the first published overview of the entire sequence. As such, the authors would like future papers referring to the entire sequence and/or its contents to cite this directory; future papers referring to the sequence of individual chromosomes should refer to the papers listed at the head of page 9. The authors’ affiliations appear in the papers describing the individual chromosomes.

The collaboration of more than 600 scientists from over 100 laboratories to sequence the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome was the largest decentralised experiment in modern molecular biology and resulted in a unique data resource representing the first complete set of genes from a eukaryotic organism. 12 million bases were sequenced in a truly international effort involving European, US, Canadian and Japanese laboratories. While the yeast genome represents only a small fraction of the information in today’s public sequence databases, the complete, ordered and non-redundant sequence provides an invaluable resource for the detailed analysis of cellular gene function and genome architecture. In terms of throughput, completeness and information content, yeast has always been the lead eukaryotic organism in genomics; it is still the largest genome to be completely sequenced.