The purpose of the any genome project is to completely sequence (i.e. to
recover the order of the bases) the entire genome of a given model
organism. To date, more than 10 entire bacterial genomes and yeast
genome have been
sequenced. There are ongoing projects for mouse, fly, dog and
man and various plants and bacteria. The human genome consists of about 
basepairs (bps) of which
only about 
correspond to genes. (There are beleived to be about 100,000 genes
in a human organism.) The knowledge of base sequence is expected to greatly
contribute to the functional genomics research.
However, current technology doesn't allow us to sequence much more than about 1,000 bps at a time, at best. The solution is to break the genome into manageable pieces in a way that we can approximately determine the relative location of each of the pieces (See Notes for week 10 -- ``Physical Mapping''). In other words, we want to subclone the DNA.