IMCB - FUGU Genome Project

Fugu: A Compact Reference Vertebrate Genome The fugu (Fugu rubripes) genome project was initiated in 1989 by Sydney Brenner and his colleagues Greg Elgar, Sam Aparicio and Byrappa Venkatesh. In 1993, this team showed that the fugu genome is only 390 Mb, about one-eighth the size of the human genome, yet it contains a similar repertoire of genes to humans (Brenner et al., Nature 366:265-268, 1993). Therefore, fugu was proposed as a useful model for annotating the human genome.