Pufferfish DNA yields clues to hum...( rated jointly by three DOE national lab...)

rated jointly by three DOE national laboratories managed by the University of California Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore in California, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. In addition to the Fugu project, the JGI has genomics programs focused on microbes, fungi, animals, and plants.

Fugu is a delicacy in Japanese cuisine that can deliver a deadly neurotoxin if improperly prepared. Its scientific value, however, is based on its small genome size. According to Daniel Rokhsar, Associate Director for Computational Genomics at the JGI, the compact structure of the Fugu genome (only one-eighth the size of its human counterpart) made it possible to identify genes that had been obscured by the many repetitive and non-coding sequences that make up about 97 percent of human DNA. Rokhsar noted that nearly three-fourths of the genes in the human genome have identifiable counterparts in Fugu, highlighting the shared anatomy and physiology common to all vertebrates. "These similarities are recognizable in the two genome sequences despite the 400 million years of evolution since the two species diverged from their common ancestor," he said. "Proteins found in humans but not in pufferfish, and vice versa, help define the sets of genes at the core of differences between four-limbed animals (reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including humans) and finned fish."

"For the first time we are seeing the overall differences as well as the similarities in the protein parts that make up fish and man," said Dr. Samuel Aparicio, Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Mechanisms in Disease at the Department of Oncology, Cambridge University, England. "When we matched the predicted Fugu proteins directly against the human genome sequence, for 961 cases we found that there was a match in human which didn't overlap an already predicted or known human gene.

"This flags up for human geneticists the position of potentially novel human
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Contact: Charles Osolin
osolin1@llnl.gov
925-296-5643
DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
25-Jul-2002

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