ROCKVILLE, Md.--The Institute for Genomic Research announced that the completed sequence of the Thermotoga maritima genome, the eighth it has sequenced, is now available through a microbial database at http://www.tigr.org. A paper summarizing the study of the nearly 2 million base-pair genome was published in the May 27 issue of Nature.
Of bacteria sequenced to date, the institute's researchers claimed that T. maritima has the highest percentage of genes that are most similar to genes from Archaea, the so-called third domain of life thought to be evolutionarily distinct from bacteria and eukaryotes.