Steven Salzberg has a post at Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience about a recent call for a project to sequence 10,000 vertebrate genomes. The proposal, from a consortium led by David Haussler and Stephen O'Brien, "is also the opening salvo in an effort to raise $50-100 million for the sequencing of these species," Salzberg writes. He's enthusiastic about the project, but suggests that its target -- funding from NIH -- is off base. "I’m going to be the skeptic here: if NIH is thinking of throwing its sequencing dollars at 10,000 more genomes, I suggest that it focus on humans rather than a broad collection of other vertebrates," he says.
In a completely unrelated post, Jonathan Eisen is celebrating a milestone for microbes -- there are now 1,000 complete bacterial and archaeal genomes in Genbank, he says.