Article downloads on the SIGS and PMC sites map to 15,350 unique IP addresses located in 4,377 cities in 152 countries. Although SIGS has not been publishing long enough to estimate our impact factor, 93 articles have been cited a total of 271 times in articles included in the Cite-by-Linking program of Cross-Ref. Moving forward Our experience with the template AZD-2281 for Short Genome Reports has been largely successful. The layout of content is highly predictable and simplifies writing, reviewing, editing and reading these articles. Yet, we are exploring the possibility of some minor changes to the tabular layout in 2012, to accommodate an anticipated influx of articles from the Thousand Genome Project, which represents the second phase of the GEBA initiative.

Although it is unlikely that we will be able to ��auto-generate�� manuscripts as a part of the sequencing and annotation pipeline, this represents an early attempt to capture and standardize much of the summarized data that is incorporated into Short Genome Reports. This will also give us an opportunity to explore how to more tightly integrate the literature and databases. The second major change for 2012 deals with funding SIGS in the future. We were very fortunate in that seed funding for SIGS was provided through grants from the Office of the Vice President of Research and Graduate Studies of Michigan State University and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the US Department of Energy. This has provided us with the opportunity to underwrite the publication costs of articles appearing in Volumes 1 �C 4 and a limited number of articles in Volume 5.

However, like other open access publications we need to institute a cost recovery mechanism to sustain publication of SIGS. More information about the publication fees is included in the Instructions to Authors.
A representative genomic 16S rRNA sequence of D. thermolithotrophum BSAT was compared using NCBI BLAST [3,4] under default settings (e.g. considering only the high-scoring segment pairs (HSPs) from the best 250 hits) with the most recent release of the Greengenes database [5] and the relative frequencies of taxa and keywords (reduced to their stem [6] were determined, weighted by BLAST scores. The most frequently occurring genera were Desulfurobacterium (30.3%), Thermoanaerobacter (18.8%), Thermovibrio (14.2%), Balnearium (11.0%) and Persephonella (4.1%) (80 hits in total). Regarding the two hits to sequences from members of the species, the average identity within HSPs was 98.9%, whereas the average coverage by HSPs was 92.8%. Regarding the single hit to sequences from other GSK-3 members of the genus, the average identity within HSPs was 98.6%, whereas the average coverage by HSPs was 64.4%.