In Genome Biology this week, joint senior authors Dieter Ebert at the University of Basel and Patrick Keeling at the University of British Columbia have sequenced the genome of Octosporea bayeri, a large microsporidian pathogen, and compared it to the more popular, and smaller, genome of Encephalitozoon cuniculi. Using Illumina sequencing, they generated 898 Mb of sequence data and annotated 2,174 genes, 893 of which encode proteins with assigned function.