Abstract
For the last decade genomics has operated by a "white paper" process whereby genomes have been prioritized for sequencing one-by-one by arguing their importance to science or industry. That made sense when genomes cost a fortune to do, but it also meant that (by definition) the next genome was always less interesting than the previous. We are now able to sequence thousands of genomes but we have to answer the critics who rightly ask "why". 1KP has taken a different approach by posing questions of importance to science or industry that might be answerable by sequencing multiple species, none of which need qualify as a species of interest in its own right. We started with transcriptomes instead of genomes only because of the lower costs, but the idea is extensible to genomes and not restricted to plants. Along the way we addressed practical problems: developing light sensitive molecules for optogenetic studies of mammalian brains and understanding the mechanism of resistance to chemotherapy treatment of cancer. In the process we finally begin to explore the vast biodiversity that to date has barely been touched by genomics.
