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Thread: Frog DNA Yields Clues to Vertebrate Genome Evolution

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    Default Frog DNA Yields Clues to Vertebrate Genome Evolution

    Science Magazine (Washington DC, USA) 30 April 2010: Frog DNA Yields Clues to Vertebrate Genome Evolution

    Add another group of animals to the growing menagerie of creatures whose genomes have been sequenced. On page 633 of this issue, Uffe Hellsten, a bioinformaticist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and his colleagues describe the sequence of the Western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis, the first member of the amphibian branch of the tree of life to be so honored.

    Amphibians branched off from other vertebrates about 350 million years ago, and the group has been evolving along a path separate from mammals, reptiles, and birds ever since. "For this reason, the frog genome sequence provides unique insights into genome dynamics over an extended period of evolution," says Ben Evans of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. "It fills in a crucial gap in our understanding of genome diversity and evolution of organisms," adds David Cannatella, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, Austin.

    The draft of the genome is in hundreds of pieces—not complete enough to be ordered chromosome by chromosome, but Hellsten and colleagues were able to match long stretches of contiguous sequence with equivalent sequences in the chicken and human genomes. A 150-million-base region in the center of human chromosome 1, for example, has a virtually identical counterpart in the frog and chicken genomes. "That implies that whole region has remained intact for 350 million years," says Hellsten, and it represents an ancient chromosome. Other matchups indicated that three stretches of DNA fused onto human chromosome 1 after breaking off from elsewhere in the genome. Another intact region in chicken and frog split up in the human genome and spread across six chromosomes. "There appears to have been more frequent chromosome fusion and fission in mammals than in birds and frogs," says Evans.

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