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)…
Why Sequence the Hydractinia Allorecognition Gene Complex?
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…
Why Sequence Sea Squirt cDNA?
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…
Why Sequence Campanulales Chloroplasts?
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…
Why Sequence a Butterfly?
The Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) comprise more than 150,000 species, many of economic importance (e.g., as pollinators, as agricultural pests, and in silk production), and have characteristic biological properties that distinguish them from all other insects (e.g., females as the heterogametic sex, derived wing color patterns and color vision, and holocentric chromosomes). However, genomic resources…
Why Sequence a Frog-Killing Fungus?
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…
Why Sequence Sorghum?
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…
Why Sequence the Monkey Flower?
One of the challenges of 21st-century biology is to determine, at the DNA sequence level, the basis of adaptive evolution in nature. The flowering plant genus Mimulus (monkey flowers) has become a leading model system for studying ecological and evolutionary genetics in nature. JGI will sequence the species Mimulus guttatus. Since Darwin, Mimulus species have…
Why Sequence Arabidopsis lyrata and Capsella rubella?
Sequencing Arabidopsis lyrata and Capsella rubella, close relatives of Arabidopsis thaliana, will leverage the rich information now available for A. thaliana, arguably the most important reference plant. Arabidopsis lyrata is the closest well-characterized relative in the same genus as A. thaliana, and Capsella is the closest well-characterized genus. Several technologies are currently being used to…
Why Sequence Sulfur-Oxidizing Bacteria?
Several environmental problems, such as acid rain, biocorrosion, etc., are caused by sulfur compounds, such as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S). A sustainable process to remove these sulfur compounds is the production of elemental sulfur from H2S-containing gas streams by the use of sulfide-oxidizing bacteria. In this process, H2S is absorbed into the…