Invertebrate species represent the vast majority of extant metazoans (33); however, only a relatively small number are represented by sequenced genomes. This despite the fact that many species have critical biomedical importance such as Anopheles gambiae, a vector for malaria and Biomphalaria glabrata, a vector for schistosomiasis (34,35). Other invertebrates including Apis mellifera, Bombyx mori and Crassostrea gigas have significant commercial value (36–38). The RefSeq group has made efforts to increase the number and scope of invertebrate genomes represented in the dataset by providing annotation via the eukaryotic genome annotation pipeline or by propagating annotation from INSDC submissions onto the RefSeq copy of those genomes. For both process flows we are dependent on the public availability of high quality genomes in INSDC databases and NCBI's Assembly database (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/assembly/). To date 46 invertebrate genomes have been annotated by NCBI including representative species of insects, arachnids, mollusks and basal chordates. We anticipate a significant expansion in the number of insect and other invertebrate genomes annotated as a result of genome initiatives such as the i5k (39), 1KITE (1K Insect Transcriptome Evolution, http://www.1kite.org/) and the Global Invertebrate Genome Alliance (http://giga.nova.edu/) (40).
