Sequencing Metazoan Genomes

It is not uncommon in my life for some matter to come to my attention and I then note related information which I might otherwise have glossed over. Must be hightened awareness. Anyway there are discussions at Telic Thoughts about a paper authored by Michael Sherman. Then there was a paper published in Nature Reviews Genetics (9, 689-698 (September 2008) | doi:10.1038/nrg2413) entitled The functional repertoires of metazoan genomes. Chris P. Ponting is the author. The sequencing of genomes and identification of protein coding genes and functional genomic sequences are touched on. The abstract:

Metazoan genomes are being sequenced at an increasingly rapid rate. For each new genome, the number of protein-coding genes it encodes and the amount of functional DNA it contains are known only inaccurately. Nevertheless, there have been considerable recent advances in identifying protein-coding and non-coding sequences that have remained constrained in diverse species. However, these approaches struggle to pinpoint genomic sequences that are functional in some species but that are absent or not functional in others. Yet it is here, encoded in lineage-specific and functional sequence, that we expect physiological differences between species to be most concentrated.