IT MAY look like a bloated pincushion when threatened, but the pufferfish
turns out to have one of the leanest genomes of all the vertebrates. The
“minimalist” genome of Fugu rubripes could help unlock the secrets of
the much grander human genome, researchers from Singapore told the conference,
by helping to identify which genes are vital to a vertebrate.
“The pufferfish genome is one-eighth the size of the human genome, but has
the same repertoire of genes,” says Byrappa Venkatesh of the Institute of
Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore. The genomes of pufferfish and humans
are very different, having…
