Meeting report: the Institute for Genomic Research/Wellcome Trust Conference: Genomes 2004 14-17 April 2004, the Wellcome Trust Conference Centre, the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK

This conference brought the microbial genomics community together to share their most up-to-the-minute achievements, so much so that several talks cannot be covered here, as the work discussed has not yet been published. This meeting report has details of a cross-section of the talks from the sessions on 'Genome analysis and comparative genomics', 'Computational genomics' and 'Functional genomics', ranging from studies on complex environmental samples, to specific pathogenic bacteria, to yeasts.