ABSTRACT
Our understanding of plant biology and evolution has been greatly aided by the recent advances in DNA sequencing technology and the development of comparative methods for genome analysis. Since year 2000, when the fi rst genomic sequence from a plant species, Arabidopsis, was released (Lin et al. 1999; Mayer 1999; Salanoubat et al. 2000; Tabata et al. 2000; Theologis et al. 2000), the nucleotide sequence of other 14 plant organisms has been made publicly available, albeit with different degrees of completion. Moreover, at the time this manuscript is being written, a total of 80 genome sequencing projects aimed at determining the nuclear genome sequences of as many land plant species or varieties have been publicly announced. While only two of them are deemed thoroughly completed (Arabidopsis and rice), 15 are at the assembly stage and the remaining 65 are in progress (NCBI data updated on March 2nd 2010, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/static/ gpstat.html). Notably, despite the immense ecological role and economical value of conifers, only one of these ongoing projects is committed to the deep characterization of a conifer genome, namely the Pine Genome Initiative (PGI) (https://pinegenomeinitiative.org/), which has become a reality almost a decade after the beginning of the genomic era in plant science. In parallel, however, a European consortium led by Sweden has recently been granted to sequence the genome of Norway spruce (https://www.upsc.se/Networks/ Networks/sprucegenome.html) and our group at the University of Udine has developed extensive genomic resources for spruce, by the deep sequencing of genomic libraries from the genomes of four Picea species, the annotation of bacterial artifi cial chromosome (BAC) clones from the genome of Norway spruce and the characterization of its repetitive components.
