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In this essay, we reflect on how the findings of the preceding papers enabled us to thicken the history of genomics. We have expanded the number of dimensions across which our historical work operated beyond extending the dimension of time. Building on this, we argue that the history of genomics became synchronically entangled with a range of communities, target species, and research agendas--among them yeast biochemistry, pig and human immunology, systematics, medical genetics, and agricultural genetics. We make sense of these entanglements with analytic categories to characterize modes of organizing and conducting sequencing, and the relationships between the practices of sequencing and the objectives of those collaborating around it: horizontal and vertical, proximate and distal, directed and undirected, as well as intensive and extensive sequencing. Our categories emerged as we analyzed and qualitatively interpreted datasets and co-authorship networks. Throughout this special issue, we have characterized genomics as a set of tools that open up connections between actors, institutions, experimental organisms, and historically contingent forms of research. We contend that presenting genomics in this way emphasizes the agency of the communities that mobilized the sequence data and offers a fresh perspective for addressing the medical and agricultural translation of that data. We close by proposing how we can develop our mixed-methods approach through the establishment of a domain ontology that would allow information on sequence submissions and publications to be connected to other forms of data, thus expanding the range of evidence available for historical analysis. This essay is part of a special issue entitled The Sequences and the Sequencers: A New Approach to Investigating the Emergence of Yeast, Human, and Pig Genomics, edited by Miguel Garcı'a-Sancho and James Lowe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the model of network genomics pioneered in the late 1980s and adopted in the European Commission-led Yeast Genome Sequencing Project (YGSP). It contrasted with the burgeoning large-scale center model being developed in the United States to sequence the yeast genome, chiefly as a pilot for tackling the human genome. We investigate the operation and connections of the two models by exploring a coauthorship network that captures different types of sequencing practices. In our network analysis, we focus on institutions that bridge both the European and American yeast whole-genome sequencing projects, and such concerted projects with non-concerted sequencing of yeast DNA. The institutions include two German biotechnology companies and Biozentrum, a research institute at Universität Basel that adopted yeast as a model to investigate cell biochemistry and molecular biology. Through assessing these bridging institutions, we formulate two analytical distinctions: between proximate and distal, and directed and undirected sequencing. Proximate and distal refer to the extent that intended users of DNA sequence data are connected to the generators of that data. Directed and undirected capture the extent to which sequencing was part of a specific research program. The networked European model, as mobilized in the YGSP, enabled the coexistence and cooperation of institutions exhibiting different combinations of these characteristics in contrast with the more uniformly distal and undirected large-scale centers. This contributes to broadening the historical boundaries of genomics and presenting a thicker historiography, one that inextricably meshes genomics with the trajectories of biotechnology and cell biology. This essay is part of a special issue entitled The Sequences and the Sequencers: A New Approach to Investigating the Emergence of Yeast, Human, and Pig Genomics, edited by Miguel Garcı'a-Sancho and James Lowe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]