The turn of the millennium has been described as the dawn of a new scientific revolution, which will have as great an impact on society as the industrial and computer revolutions before. This revolution was heralded by a large-scale DNA sequencing effort in July 1995, when the entire million base pairs of the genome of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae was published – the first of a free-living organism. Since then, the amount of DNA sequence data in publicly accessible data bases has been growing exponentially, including a working draft of the complete billion base-pair DNA sequence of the entire human genome, as pre-released by an international.
