A meeting was held on February 27, 1999, in Beverly, Massachusetts, sponsored by New England Biolabs, Inc., to establish an international consortium to investigate the genome structure of Wolbachia. The purpose of the Wolbachia Genome Consortium is to provide an organizational structure for scientific interactions and collaborations and for the development of strategic initiatives that will benefit the community of Wolbachia researchers. The specific goal of the meeting was to devise and initiate a plan for sequencing representative Wolbachia genomes, which in turn will provide a framework for medical and biologic studies of these bacteria. The list of participants at this first meeting is provided in Table 1.
