Comparative genomics: lessons from cats

The genomics era, spearheaded by dazzling technological developments in human and mouse gene mapping, has additionally provoked extensive comparative gene mapping projects for domestic species of several vertebrate orders. As the human genome project promises a one dimensional string of 100 000 genes and sequences, comparative mapping will extend that inference to a second dimension representing index species of the 20 living mammalian orders and to a third dimension by phylogenetic description of the genomes of mammal ancestors. We review here the remarkable extent of genome homology conservation among mammals illustrated by technology applications in the feline genome project.