The genome of the zebrafish Danio rerio is to be deciphered by a
dedicated team at Britain's Sanger Centre. The project to
sequence the zebrafish's 1.7 x 109 base-pair genome - about half
the size of that of the mouse or human genome - is expected to
take three years. As with all projects undertaken by the Sanger
Centre, the sequence information will be released rapidly and
made available to researchers without cost or restriction.
Researchers will then be able to use this model organism to
"fill in the gaps" in biological processes already under
investigation in yeast, flies and worms, says Professor
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard from the Max-Planck Institute in
Tubingen, who received a Nobel Prize in 1995 for her work on
Drosophila and in the past decade has turned her attention to
zebrafish. Even more importantly, perhaps, the fish "will make
an enormous contribution to our understanding of organ
formation," she says. "Zebrafish is the ideal organism to study
the function of human genes." Insights into many