In a paper published online in Genome Biology this week, a team led by investigators at the Baylor College of Medicine reports a draft genome sequence of Dictyostelium purpureum, a social amoeba. When compared with the D. discoideum sequence, the D. purpuream genome appears to have undergone little functional change, despite the species' divergence from a common ancestor approximately 400 million years ago, according to the Baylor-led team.