Acknowledgements.

The author heavily relied on several key resources in particular. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) includes not only many user-friendly research tools but also a lot of background information and tutorials. The Human Genome Project Information site, http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml, though obviously not focused on plants, has very good informative information. Dr. Steven Tanksley of Cornell University provided many of the pictures and definitions in Section 2 and 4. Members of the Institute for Genomic Diversity at Cornell helped greatly with suggestions on topics to include. Finally, several sources were of considerable value, including: Christopher Cullis’ book “ Plant Genomics and Proteomics” (2004), Handbook of Comparative Genomics (Saccone and Pesole 2003), and the tutorial by Schneider and La Rota (2000) at http://cbsu.tc.cornell.edu/resources/seq_comp/TOC.html. Section 1 relied heavily on my own dissertation (Fulton TM (2002) Changing science: Plant genomics in the U.S. (Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University) Dissertation Abstracts International 63/04: 1528), available on request.