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Article: They're sequencing a what? Genome scientists go out on a limb of the tree of life.
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- October 9, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Quick. Would you know a placozoan if it bit you? Not that it actually would attack, unless you were as small as a fleck of algae. And even then, it wouldn't bite but would instead clamp down and ooze digestive enzymes. Yet this summer, placozoans--the simplest of free-living multicellular animals--and some other, equally nonfamous creatures made the list of targets for the next wave of DNA sequencing to be funded by the U.S. government. As genome science is expanding in scope, its targets have begun to span the tree of life.
Sequencing a genome, figuring out the order of bases of a creature's DNA molecules, often gets compared to reading the book of life. Tallies ...