A pufferfish offers a compact version of the human genome, packing essentially the same information into one-eighth the DNA. It includes the protein-encoding exons and their control regions, but it lacks many repeats and has compressed introns interrupting its genes. This correspondence makes the pufferfish genome a uniquely useful tool to annotate the human genome, and sequencing it has been a goal since 1989. But "its" is a misnomer, because in late 2001, researchers revealed the genome sequences of two species of pufferfish.
The Fugu Genome Consortium, of which Elgar's group is a part, announced the sequencing of the Japanese pufferfish Fugu rubripes at the 13th International Genome Sequencing and Analysis Conference in San Diego on Oct. 25. The International Fugu Genome Consortium includes the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, Myriad Genetics Inc. of Salt Lake City, the Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology of Singapore, the Singapore ...
