I am new to bioinformatics and just for the sake of this question, suppose that I am looking for the full genome sequence of [*Escherichia coli*][1] and [*Saccharomyces cerevisiae*][2] in FASTA format. I thought that these would be fairly easy to find online.

For Escherichia coli I was only able to find some links to the ncbi website but I could not find anywhere in the website a link to download the genome in FASTA format. For Saccharomyces cerevisiae, I found [this FTP site][3] linked by ensembl with the sequence for each chromosome. I suppose that I could concatenate all the files in order to obtain the full genome in one file but isn't there already one file with the entire sequence? I saw the top level files but those only appear for masked and soft masked DNA, I think it would be doable to work with those if modern sequencers masked the DNA automatically, do they?

So, in summary, how do experienced people find full reference genomes for those two organisms and possibly other common species? I have only been using Google and the only page that appears to provide FASTA files for some species is Ensembl.

 [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli
 [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharomyces_cerevisiae
 [3]: ftp://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/current_fasta/saccharomyces_cerevisiae/dna/
<p>The short answer is:</p>

<ul>
	<li>this is a rare case where simply &quot;Googling&quot; will not help you very much; Google works using &quot;popularity&quot; and most people are not interested in &quot;genome sequences fasta format&quot; :)</li>
	<li>&quot;experienced people&quot; know that there are a few key sites where genomic data can be found, as covered in previous answers - NCBI, Ensembl, UCSC, <a href="http://img.jgi.doe.gov/">JGI</a></li>
	<li>and then it is simply a case of exploring those sites and bookmarking the most useful areas for future reference - voil&agrave;, you are now experienced</li>
</ul>
