The Fugu draft now contains some 300 million bases arranged in disconnected strings of sequence called scaffolds. Commonly used on microbes, this technique was first applied to a vertebrate genome-the human's-by Celera, a move that created much controversy. Rather than sequence the genome piece by piece as was done for the Human Genome Project, the team took the whole-genome shotgun approach, chopping the entire genome into millions of overlapping bits for sequencing. in Salt Lake City and Celera Genomics Inc. Joining later were two companies: Myriad Genetics Inc. In November 2000, the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, decided to help Brenner realize his dream, aided by colleagues in Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Seattle, Washington. The fish also has very little noncoding DNA, which has bogged down genome sequencing in mice, humans, and many other organisms. More than a decade ago, molecular biologist Sydney Brenner of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, began pushing for a Fugu genome project, as it has the smallest known genome for a vertebrate, with genes spaced quite close together. As only the second genome from a vertebrate to reach this stage of completion (the other being the human), the Fugu sequence is already proving useful for learning about the human genome, the researchers announced in San Diego at the 13th International Genome Sequencing and Analysis Conference. Today, an international team announced that it had determined the order of most of the 300 million bases that comprise the genome of the animal, Fugu rubripes. The Japanese pufferfish, best known as a potentially fatal delicacy if not prepared properly, is about to become a powerful tool in genomics.

Japanese fugu