Few days after I had explained my research on the genome of nectar-specialist yeast Metschnikowia reukaufii to Michael Garvey, a steel-working, oil-drilling physiotherapist from Glennamaddy, Ireland, he politely by confusedly asked, “So how are your ‘geonomes’ coming along?”. I thought about his minor pronunciation error for a while. And it reminded me of the the work Jill Banfield and others have been doing, to assemble complete or near complete microbial genomes from discrete environmental samples. You get enough of those and then you have an estimate of genomic diversity of a geographic region, giving you a “Geonome”! Hence the term Geonome was born.
geonomes 