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Phil Youderian and Susan Golden are initiating an effort to do a functional and sequence analysis of the Synechococcus sp. strain PCC 7942 genome. Unlike projects that use shotgun sequencing to get the genome, then leave the functional information to be figured out later, they're doing it in the other order, generating functional data at every step as the genomic sequence emerges. The initial cosmid library will be created in Salmonella prophage P22 and will be ordered using transduction and complementation of Salmonella auxotrophs and conditional mutants to identify overlapping clones. A minimal cosmid set will subjected to insertion mutagenesis using the phage mini-mu, and pools of insertions will be used to make mutants in Synechococcus. As a first screen for interesting cosmids, they'll look for mutants with defects in circadian rhythm. The mini-mu insertions will also be the sequencing templates, sequencing out from ordered insertions about every 500 bp. Everything, from cosmid libraries to sequence to mutants, will be made available to the community as swiftly as possible.