lpetrich

From <a href="http://gnn.tigr.org" target="_blank">the Genome News Network</a> comes this news:

The DOE's <a href="http://www.jgi.doe.gov" target="_blank">Joint Genome Institute</a> has gotten to work on the genome of a frog, Xenopus tropicalis, a close relative of a favorite experimental subject, Xenopus laevis. The reason for this close-relative selection is that X. laevis has a genome doubling relative to X. tropicalis, making sequencing the latter's genome faster and cheaper.

And there is an article about those lobbying for the dog genome, which will likely be considered along the cat, cow, and pig genomes. Dogs have the nice feature that their masters have maintained numerous breeds of them, sometimes complete with carefully-kept pedigrees. And dogs have been used as a model system for some human diseases.

There is also an article about reefs made by communities of microbes on the bottom of the Black Sea. These microbes live off of combining methane with sulfates:

CH4 + H2SO4 -&gt; CO2 + 2H2O + H2S

Microbes with this or similar sorts of metabolism could have been common on the early Earth; organisms elsewhere in the Solar System, like on Mars or Europa, could subsist (or have subsisted) on similar sorts of metabolism.

[ September 06, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>