The genome, published in this week's online edition of PNAS, is 4.3 million base pairs long and encodes almost 4,000 open reading frames.
V. fischeri belongs to the same family as the cholera bacterium but does not cause disease. The researchers sequenced V. fischeri ES114, which lives as a symbiont in the light-emitting organ of the bobtail squid, where it produces luminescence.
The consortium that sequenced the prganism includes researchers at the