Information obtained from sequencing is also being used to provide enzymes for biotechnical and industrial applications.

             The impact that genome sequencing has had, and will have, on our view of life only begins here. It appears that the time has come to move formal taxonomy and phylogenetic classification into line with the system emerging from molecular data.

             Prior to the 1960's, evolutionary study had been confined to multicellular eucaryotes whose histories, at best, only cover about 20% of the total evolutionary time span. Plants and animals have complex morphologies, which served as the basis for their phylogenetic classification. In contrast, bacteria have morphologies that are too simple to be used in this way. Many early microbiologists avoided the area of phylogenetic classification for this reason, despite the fact that the history of the microbial world spans most of the Earth's existence. Those who did study the discipline created distorted schemes that are now under review.

             Since the 1950's, molecular studies have been used to determine evolutionary relationships, although microbiology remained blind to the potential of this unique approach until rRNA sequences were shown to provide a key to procaryotic phylogeny in the 1970's. It would appear that genome sequencing has advanced the science of phylogenetic classification even further.

             The failing view of the organisation of life was that all living things were either plant or animal in nature. In 1990, a proposal for a new, natural system of organisms was published, based on the rRNA sequencing revolution. The more recent genome sequencing era has supported this original proposal, and as a result three domains of life are currently recognised; Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya, as shown in the universal phylogenetic tree below.

             When the first archaeal genome (Methanococcus jannaschii) was sequenced in 1996, it was found that only 44% of the genes were familiar .