Wednesday, 19 September 2007

zoology - Why is the frog genome so much larger than a fish's?

As we have heard in the summaries of the human ENCODE project, 80 per cent of junk DNA appears to have an essential function. Many fish have a genome with only one tenth the size of a usual vertebrate genome. Why can fish have 1/10th of junk DNA and be still fully functional? What has a frog more than a fish has? I'm especially interested if we can see the difference somewhere, complexity of physiology or anatomy, or such.



Jap. puffer fish genome: 390 Megabases, 47,800-49,000 genes (UniProt)



Medaka genome: 690 Megabases, 24,600 genes



Clawed frog: 1,500 Megabases, 23,500 genes

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