The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) was created in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in genome mapping, DNA sequencing, technology development, and information sciences pioneered at the existing DOE genome centres. With sequencing capacity of more than a trillion bases generated annually, a full fifth of the genome projects at sequencing centers worldwide are done by the DOE JGI. The DOE JGI makes the high-quality genome sequencing data generated freely available to the greater scientific community through its web portal and on public databases.