Mitochondria and plastids (collectively called organelles) descended from prokaryotes that
adopted an intracellular, endosymbiotic lifestyle within early eukaryotes. Comparisons of their
remnant genomes address a wide variety of biological questions, especially when including the
genomes of their prokaryotic relatives and the many genes transferred to the eukaryotic nucleus
during the transitions from endosymbiont to organelle. The pace of producing complete organellar
genome sequences now makes it unfeasible to do broad comparisons using the primary
literature and, even if it were feasible, it is now becoming uncommon for journals to accept detailed
descriptions of genome-level features. Unfortunately, no database is completely useful for
this task, since they have little standardization and are riddled with error. Further, the descriptors
necessary to make full use of these data are generally lacking. Here, I outline what is
currently wrong and what must be done to make this data useful to the scientific community.
This paper is part of the special issue of OMICS on data standards.
