The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University completed the sequencing of the Caenorhabditis elegans genome. This was the first multicellular eukaryotic genome to be completed: Science, 1998.

The 100 Mb genome is organized in six chromosomes and annotation represents more than 20,000 genes. The gene, transcript, and protein annotation is provided by WormBase and NCBI provides ab initio model predictions and calculates alignments to provide the C. elegans UniGene (Cel_UniG) and transcript (Cel_EST) maps.

A majority of the protein coding genes are supported by expression data, and more than half of the annotated proteins have significant matches to organisms outside pseudocoelomates.

Available Documentation:

• NCBI Handbook: Map Viewer chapter - resource description
• NCBI Handbook: Map Viewer Exercises - tutorials and examples
• Map Viewer Help - details about navigation and customizing your display
• Genome Assembly - description of genome assembly and annotation process
• Gnomon - description of NCBI's Hidden Markov Model (HMM) ab initio prediction program

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