Scientists said 2009's 44 projects represent a continuing effort to tap the "vast, unexplored reaches of the Earth's microbial and plant domains for bioenergy and environmental applications."

Researchers said the 44 projects were culled from nearly 150 proposals and represent more than 60 billion nucleotides of data to be generated -- roughly the equivalent of 20 human genomes.

"The scientific and technological advances enabled by the information that we generate from these selections promise to take us faster and further down the path toward clean, renewable transportation fuels, while affording us a more comprehensive understanding of the global carbon cycle," said Eddy Rubin the director of the Joint Genome Institute. "The range of projects spans important terrestrial contributors to biomass production in the Loblolly pine -- the cornerstone of the U.S. forest products industry -- to phytoplankton, barely visible to the naked eye but no less important to the massive generation of fixed carbon in our marine ecosystems."

A list of the 2009 sequencing projects is available at http://www.jgi.doe.gov/sequencing/cspseqplans2009.html.