Dictyostelium discoideum GeneDB

Dictyostelium discoideum is a soil amoeba widely used as a model organism in cell and developmental biology. The amoeba shares many physiological functions seen in mammalian cells and is amenable to genetic manipulation.

The entire D. discoideum genome has been sequenced by an international consortium including Baylor College of Medicine, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the Institut Pasteur and the GSC Jena in collaboration with the Institute of Biochemistry in Cologne (please visit the page under the consortium link in the information section on this page).

GeneDB contains version 2 of the D. discoideum genome sequence. This consists of 308 ordered chromosomal contigs amounting to nearly 34 MB of sequence. In addition to this there are 34 unanchored contigs amounting to 225,339 bp. All have been finished to a high degree of accuracy although there are still some gaps to resolve. The chromosomal contigs have been joined together into single sequences with sequence - and physical gaps represented by runs of Ns. A mainly automatic analysis has been performed on the genome sequence and this is also accessible through GeneDB. A small section of the sequence has been manually revised. This is the last ~1.5 Mb of the chromosome 6 sequence (3').

The same data can also be viewed in DictyBase. The gene models in GeneDB are displayed with their DictyBase identifier as the systematic name and their version 1 identifier (if the gene model existed in version 1) as the previous systematic ID.

For details about the nomenclature please visit the page under the nomenclature link in the information section on this page.

May 2005
Genome published in Nature:

The genome of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum
Nature 2005 vol.435, pp.43-57