An international team led by investigators in France outlines efforts to sequence and characterize the genome of the red algal species Chondrus crispus, commonly called Irish moss — a member of a lineage descended from the first photosynthetic eukaryotes formed through endosymbiosis. After using Sanger sequencing to tackle a C. crispus sample grown from material collected in Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, in the 1980s, the researchers delved into the 105 million-base-pair genome sequence, identifying 9,600 or so predicted protein-coding genes.