Sequence of Bacillus subtilis chromosome

[Conrad Halton Halling]

In light of the recent controversy over whether merging overlapping sequences
is beneficial and useful, I think the following entry in GenBank is
interesting:

>LOCUS       BACCHROMO   17974 bp ds-DNA             BCT       18-OCT-1991
>DEFINITION  Sequence of Bacillus subtilis chromosome.
>ACCESSION   M80245
>
>       Lines deleted...
>
>REFERENCE   6  (bases 1 to 17974)
>  AUTHORS   Henner,D.J.
>  TITLE     Sequence of Bacillus subtilis chromosome
>  JOURNAL   Unpublished (1991)
>
>       Lines deleted...
>

Does this mean that M80245 will one day become THE accession number for
Bacillus subtilis?  In the meantime, the DEFINITION is misleading in
the extreme. :-)

Furthermore, I'd like to point out that it is virtually impossible to
obtain the accession number of such a "complete" entry if you know only
that an entry with the sequence of a chromosome of organism X exists.
Using IRX to search GenBank, the following search strings give the following
number of hits:

sequence of Bacillus subtilis chromosome                30,992 entries
sequence AND Bacillus subtilis AND chromosome              544 entries
sequence of Escherichia coli chromosome                 31,998 entries
sequence AND Escherichia coli AND chromosome             1,745 entries

So if there is an analogous entry for Escherichia coli (i.e. "DEFINITION
Sequence of Escherichia coli chromosome"), I have to page through at
least 544 entries to find out.  Since I get logged off automatically after
20 minutes, it's doubtful I'd have time. :-)

-- 
Conrad Halling
c-halling at uchicago.edu