Until recently, the Human Genome Project held centre stage in the press releases concerning sequencing programmes. However, in October 2001, it was announced that the Japanese puffer fish (Takifugu rubripes, Fugu) was the second vertebrate organism to be sequenced to draft quality. Briefly, the spotlight was on fish genomes. There are currently two other fish species undergoing intensive sequen...

Using zebrafish intestinal fatty acid-binding protein 2 (FABP2) mRNA sequence as the initial query probe, four highly homologous Paralichthys olivaceus EST sequences were retrieved from Genbank database. The assembled full-length cDNA contains the open reading frame of P. olivaceus FABP2 gene, which was validated by subsequent RT-PCR cloning. In the coding region, the average GC content is 56%,...

There has been much interest in CpG islands (CGIs), clusters of CpG dinucleotides in GC-rich regions, because they are considered gene markers and involved in gene regulation. To date, there has been no genome-wide analysis of CGIs in the fish genome. We first evaluated the performance of three popular CGI identification algorithms in four fish genomes (tetraodon, stickleback, medaka, and zebra...