McCombie noted that new sequencing technologies could be applied to BAC-based strategies so as to dramatically increase the speed and cost-effectiveness of genome sequencing. This topic was addressed by David Bentley (Solexa, Great Chesterford, UK), who described recent progress in developing high-throughput chip-based sequencing technologies that have already radically improved the throughput and cost-effectiveness of sequencing. Using simultaneous base-by-base sequencing of up to 40 million immobilized templates, average read lengths of 35 bases of high-quality data can be generated, within a few hours. Improvements in dye chemistry, polymerase and imaging methods promise to increase read lengths, but already the huge depth of coverage can give accuracies of over 99%. The range of applications for this technology, apart from resequencing, includes digital gene-expression profiling, BAC sequencing and polymorphism detection, all of which are currently very cost-effective using Solexa technology. On cue, a project that could really only be countenanced with such breakthrough technologies was described by Catherine Feuillet (French National Institute for Agricultural Research