Juvenile zebrafishWIKIMEDIA, SHAWN BURGESS, NHGRI
Species: Zebrafish, Danio rerio
Genome size: ~1.41 billion base pairs
The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a widely used genetic, developmental, and disease model organism because of the near-effortlessness of imaging transparent zebrafish embryos and the variety of tools available to manipulate their genes. Plus, the small fish are relatively easy and inexpensive to keep in the lab. Drafts of the zebrafish genome have been steadily improving for over a decade, but with a study published in Nature in April, zebrafish researchers finally have a high-quality reference genome with which to work. Researchers found 26,000 protein-coding genes—the most uncovered in any vertebrate species. About 70 percent of these genes were orthologous with human genes. In a second study, the same team detailed their work to mutagenize, ...
