Fish tale.docVIP

/2002/3/9/comment/1012.1 Comment Fish tale Gregory A Petsko Address: Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA. E-mail: petsko@ Published: 27 August 2002 GenomeBiology 2002, 3(9):comment1012.1–1012.2 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2002/3/9/comment/1012 ? BioMed Central Ltd (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) OK, I promise to try to keep the fish jokes to a minimum, but it won’t be easy. The draft sequence of the genome of the rubripes, shouting for someone to call 911 - which of course isn’t 911 in Japan - only to see him suddenly sit upright with a big grin on his face, while the rest of the party burst out laughing. Apparently, this is a fairly standard initiation rite for first- time Fugu consumers. Japanese pufferfish, Fugu has just been announced (Aparicio et al., Science, 25 July 2002; 10.1126/ science.1072104) and the temptation to humor is great. Fugu displaces the nematode worm as the most intrinsically humorous organism to have had its genome sequenced, the Caenorhabditis elegans folks having finally wriggled out of that embarrassing situation. It used to be thought that pufferfish had little to offer beyond a good dinner and an opportunity for sudden death, but now the scales, so to speak, have fallen from our eyes. Genetically speaking, Fugu is full of riches, right up to the gills, as it were. Ugly and toxic it may be, but to the genomicist Fugu is a thing of beauty. Its inflationary tendency does not extend to its genome. Fugu has the smallest known genome size of any vertebrate organism, about one eighth the size of the human genome. Yet the number of genes in its 365 megabases of DNA is 35,000-40,000, about the same as in the human or mouse genomes. It would seem that, as far as gene number is concerne