Owen White, ¹ Jonathan A. Eisen, ¹ John F. Heidelberg, ¹ Erin K. Hickey, ¹ Jeremy D. Peterson, ¹ Robert J. Dodson, ¹ Daniel H. Haft, ¹ Michelle L. Gwinn, ¹ William C. Nelson, ¹ Delwood L. Richardson, ¹ Kelly S. Moffat, ¹ Haiying Qin, ¹ Lingxia Jiang, ¹ Wanda Pamphile, ¹ Marie Crosby, ¹ Mian Shen, ¹ Jessica J. Vamathevan, ¹ Peter Lam, ¹ Lisa McDonald, ¹ Terry Utterback, ¹ Celeste Zalewski, ¹ Kira S. Makarova, ² L. Aravind, ² Michael J. Daly, ³ Kenneth W. Minton, ³ Robert D. Fleischmann, ¹ Karen A. Ketchum, ¹ Karen E. Nelson, ¹ Steven Salzberg, ¹ Hamilton O. Smith, ^1* J. Craig , Venter, ^1* Claire M. Fraser ¹

The complete genome sequence of the radiation-resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans R1 is composed of two chromosomes (2,648,638 and 412,348 base pairs), a megaplasmid (177,466 base pairs), and a small plasmid (45,704 base pairs), yielding a total genome of 3,284,156 base pairs. Multiple components distributed on the chromosomes and megaplasmid that contribute to the ability of D. radiodurans to survive under conditions of starvation, oxidative stress, and high amounts of DNA damage were identified. Deinococcus radiodurans represents an organism in which all systems for DNA repair, DNA damage export, desiccation and starvation recovery, and genetic redundancy are present in one cell.

¹ The Institute for Genomic Research, 9712 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850, USA.
² National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA.
³ Department of Pathology, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA.
^*   Present address: Celera Genomics, 45 West Gude Drive, Rockville, MD 20850, USA.

   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: drdb{at}tigr.org