Figure 1. Current Genome Sequences Across the Eukaryotes.

Numbers of eukaryotic taxonomic families represented with a reference genome assembly in NCBI. A: listed by phylum. B: Breakouts for phyla with especially large numbers of taxa. The vast majority of these reference genomes are in draft status, as very few large eukaryotic genomes have been finished. Some are of low quality with particularly short contigs. NCBI was searched using the web-link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/taxonomy/?term=family%5Brank%5D+taxonomy_assembly_exp%5B filter%5D+Araneae%5Borgn%5D in March 2015, where the term Araneae can be replaced with other taxonomic terms in the database. This returns a list and number of families with a genome assembly. Note that the described prokaryotes and archaea have representative genome sequences for essentially all described families. Although the numbers are smaller due to the need to culture a prokaryote before assigning an official species, this fact speaks to the immense utility of genome sequences when studying the microbial world as well as the ease and low cost of generating effectively finished references. By contrast only 7.9% of eukaryotic families have a representative genome sequence, and, of course, a far smaller percentage of genera and species.