Fish are rising.docVIP

/2001/2/7/reports/4016.1 Meeting report Fish are rising David Bassett Address: Comparative and Developmental Genetics Section, MRC Human Genetics Unit, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh EH4 2XU, UK. E-mail: David.Bassett@hgu.mrc.ac.uk Published: 28 June 2001 GenomeBiology 2001, 2(7):reports4016.1–4016.2 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2001/2/7/reports/4016 ? BioMed Central Ltd (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) Centre is already providing a high-stringency search engine A report on the second European conference on zebrafish for the zebrafish community to use in accessing the genetics and development, University College, London, 19- 22 April 2001. sequence. This will be followed by increased efforts to sequence a minimal overlapping set of bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) covering the whole genome (being generated by Robert Geisler, Max Planck Institute for Devel- opmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany and Ron Plasterk, Hubrecht Laboratory, Utrecht, The Netherlands). High- throughput restriction fingerprinting of BAC libraries is under way to generate tenfold coverage of the 25 chromo- somes of the diploid zebrafish genome, equivalent to 2,600 cM or 1.7 gigabases. Contigs generated using overlap- Several major factors that are bringing the zebrafish to the fore as a genomic resource and genetic model system were showcased at this meeting. The small, cheap, tropical, fresh- water zebrafish is an important vertebrate developmental model organism that is widely used for random mutagenesis projects and is well suited to embryological manipulation because of its externally developing transparent embryos. More recently, new techniques including insertional mutage- nesis, imaging and ablation of cells in live embryos, using easy-to-make transgenics carr