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Since you said plant/animal/anything, I offer the smallest genomes in various categories... (Kb means Kilobases, Mb means Megabases. 1 Kb = 1000 base pairs, 1Mb = 1000Kb) Smallest plant genome: Genlisea margaretae at 63Mb (Greilhuber et al., 2006) Smallest animal genome: Pratylenchus coffeae (nematode worm) at 20Mb (Animal Genome Size DB) Smallest ...

LG stands for "linkage group". It seems the Chicken Genome Sequence group (Hillier et al., 2004) allocated several linkage groups (alleles or genes which tend to be inherited together) to the microchromosomes (tiny chromosomes typical of birds and reptiles), in this case called "linkage group E64" and "linkage group E22....". There are a load more ...

The techniques used to do this are ChIP-seq and ChIP-chip. Basically, you let the pathogen bind to the (highly replicated) DNA cut up the DNA into little random pieces by sonication enrich (“pull down”) the pathogen-bound DNA fragments by using a known antibody which binds to the pathogen sequence the thus enriched DNA map the sequenced fragments back to ...

I want to say Mycoplasma genitalium with a genome size of 582,970 bp. Turns out the answer is Nanoarchaeum eqitans with a genome of 490,885 bp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoarchaeum http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14566062

That was surprisingly buried. I found this in a paper describing genome build 3 - See "Materials and Methods". I imagine that this is consistent through to the current build. In any case it should get you started. "Sequencing templates were made from P1, BAC and WGS DNA libraries using the D. melanogaster strain yellow (y1); cinnabar (cn1) brown (bw1) ...

Genome size is a poor indicator of an organism's complexity (already an ill-defined term). We cannot assume by any means that a larger genome corresponds to a more "complex" organism. There are some plants whose genomes are larger than most mammals, and indeed the largest eukaryotic genome (at least as of 2010) is the plant Paris japonica, weighing in at 1C ...

See here for an ENCODE author's reflections on their use of the word "functional". (I don't think anyone is using the word "essential".) It is clear from this that, for them, one class of functional DNA is intronic DNA: i.e. introns are defined by ENCODE as functional DNA. It is well known that puffer fish have reduced genomes and that this is largely due ...

As Armatus pointed out above, all viruses are obligately intracellular, and their medical and economic importance cannot be overstated. Many bacterial species live intracellularly. The arthropod specific Wolbachia has a wide variety of consequences for its host, including alteration of reproduction and sex ratios, induction of reproductive isolation ...

As @dd3 points out, average GC% indicates a need for stability and coding regions or structural regions of the genome may need to be more stable. But the largest %GC in genomes are found in thermophiles - organisms which live in high temperature water - in hotsprings and undersea geothermal vents. This review mentions how some thermophiles can be found with ...

You can package linear genomes much more efficiently than circular genomes, and bacteria simply don't require the information density to be prosperous. To be a bit more specific, it's the torque strain put on the double-helix while it's being wound that makes the difference. Linear genomes can be wound around Histones, and these Histones can be further ...

This question appears to start from the premise that different species of yeast are closely related, but they aren't. Saccharomyces cerevisae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe, both Ascomycetes, are thought to have diverged at least 300 million years ago (c.f. the mammalian divergence from other vertebrates was about 200 million years ago). S. cerevisiae has a ...

There is significant variation in genomic GC content, both between species and within an individual genome. An average GC content in the range of 35%-45% is common, although there are definitely organisms that fall outside this range. The plasmodium species you link to above is an example of extreme AT richness (low GC content), whereas some bacterial ...

A colleague of mine discovered the cipher that determines TAL effector DNA specificities, which is described in this short paper. These specificities were determined by observing TAL effectors bound to DNA and recording how often a given repeat-variable diresidue (RVD) would correspond to a given nucleotide (using a weight matrix). Now that the ...

The seedbank terdon mentions is the Norwegian Svalbard Global Seed Vault located at Spitsbergen island: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault However, the closest thing to a concerted initiative for sequencing animals I know of is the Genome 10K project: http://genome10k.soe.ucsc.edu/ Their list of first 101 vertebrata proposed for ...

To begin, one might ask "What is the advantage of higher GC content?" Higher GC content is associated with higher stability of the DNA, and accordingly, people have suggested that this is important for protein-coding regions. It has been found that there are quite a few protein-coding regions in GC-rich regions, but I am not sure whether the converse is ...

Good answer from Daniel. I'd also add that there can be significant differences between chromosomal or nuclear DNA GC content and that of extra-chromosomal entities like mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes or (naturally occurring) plasmids. These DNAs have different constraints on them (replication, sub-cellular location, eg) and that may be reflected to ...

Try YEASTRACT http://www.yeastract.com/ YEASTRACT (Yeast Search for Transcriptional Regulators And Consensus Tracking) is a curated repository of more than 48333 regulatory associations between transcription factors (TF) and target genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, based on more than 1200 bibliographic references. It also includes the ...