Catfish are a two-billion-dollar industry in the United States, representing 68% of all U.S. aquaculture production. Catfish have served as model species for comparative immunology, reproductive physiology, and toxicology among ectothermic vertebrates because of their unique characteristics. This project involves sequencing expressed sequence tags (ESTs) for two closely related catfish species. Channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus)… [Read More]

Colonial animals typically display the capacity to discriminate between their own tissues and those of unrelated members of their own species, the recognition event culminating in either fusion or rejection. Such allorecognition systems have long been of interest to geneticists by virtue of the substantial allotypic diversity they display. The sequencing of the Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus… [Read More]

Ascidians are invertebrate chordates, which diverged from the vertebrate lineage near the root of the chordate phylogenetic tree. Their larvae have a tadpole structure that closely resembles lower vertebrate larvae. They are, however, composed of a very small number of cells (2600 for Ciona intestinalis), have a stereotyped development due to invariant cleavage patterns, and… [Read More]

Something happened in the plant order Campanulales that fundamentally destabilized the chloroplast genome. Chloroplast gene order is highly conserved among virtually all land plants, and foreign DNA is not normally incorporated into the chloroplast genome. In the Campanulales, however, inversions and other genome rearrangements occur exceptionally often, and these are commonly associated with the insertion… [Read More]

Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is a unique fungus responsible for chytridiomycosis, an emerging infectious disease that is responsible for global amphibian declines. First identified in 1998 on frogs originating from Australia and Central America, B. dendrobatidis has now been reported to be killing frogs on every continent except Asia and Antarctica. Despite international collaboration and considerable research… [Read More]

One of the world’s leading grain crops, sorghum is also an important model for tropical grasses of worldwide importance with a collective minimum economic impact of $69 billion U.S. per year. As a model for the tropical grasses, sorghum is a logical complement to Oryza (rice), the first monocot plant to be sequenced. Sorghum is… [Read More]