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Science 6 November 1998:
Vol. 282. no. 5391, p. 1017
DOI: 10.1126/science.282.5391.1017b
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ScienceScope

Add social amoebas--once known as slime molds--and the zebrafish to the growing menagerie of organisms having their genes mapped or sequenced. Amoeba researchers hope to discover the basic genes that make multicelled organisms possible, while zebrafish geneticists are fishing for clues to human diseases and development.

The zebrafish project, begun in September, has wide appeal: Thirteen of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have pledged a total of $4.7 million to fund five 3-year grants to map 10,000 Danio rerio genome markers. Biologists hope the map will help them connect hundreds of known fish mutations to human genes and diseases (Science, 14 February 1997, p. 923). Two reports in the November Nature Genetics of the first examples of zebrafish models for human disease--porphyria and a type of genetic anemia--are just "the tip of the iceberg," says Leonard Zon of Children's Hospital in Boston.

This week, the European Union joined the NIH and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinshaft in a $2.7-million-a-year effort to sequence the amoeba Dictyostelium's 34 million base pairs. Three labs are working on the 3- to 5-year project.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)