The frog is cousin to the Western clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), which is often used to study embryo development and cell biology and having its genome will make sequencing laevis easier to do, said Harland.
Because frogs are especially sensitive to minute amounts of chemical that mimic hormones and can disrupt their endocrine system, the sequence will aid in research into endocrine disruption, a topic of huge interest among researchers just now, said Uffe Hellsten at the Joint Genome Institute and first author on the paper.
Read more at the Courier-Journal.