The Puffer Forum

I found some articles about the Tetraodon nigroviridis Genome Mapping. I just thought it would be cool to find out what was the closest evolutionary ancestor of the Puffer fish and when the very first puffer fish began swimming the deep blue seas.


[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 1916a.html]


[''It may come as a surprise, therefore, to find that the list now includes not one, but two species of Tetraodontiformes, a relatively obscure group of fish also known as puffers. Following on from the publication two years ago of the genome sequence of the Japanese pufferfish Takifugu rubripes1, Jaillon and colleagues2 report, on page 946 of this issue, the near-complete sequence of the spotted green pufferfish Tetraodon nigroviridis. Takifugu is a poisonous marine fish best known to connoisseurs of sushi restaurants, whereas Tetraodon is a small, brackish-water pufferfish commonly kept in aquaria. But, like all Tetraodontiformes, the two species share a feature of great convenience for genomics: their cells possess less DNA than those of any other group of backboned animals — about eight or nine times less than human cells.'']

The family has unusually 'clean' DNA. The number of genes is still comparable to the high land vertebrates.

Thats interesting about the ''Clean DNA'' you mention. What does that mean?

It would be interesting if they can splice their DNA with humans so we can have the ability to secrete poison and puff up when threatened. LMAO

My GSP already behaves like a puppy. He curls into a ball and sleeps on the bottom of the tank. They are unusual fish.

Mine used to do that. They stopped for some reason.

Puffer toxin is not produced by puffers. It is from their diet in the wild. The toxin is bacterial in origin. They are obvious immune to it, but they can and do store it in various parts of their bodies (depending on the species of puffer).

A "clean" genome means that there is very little "nonsense" (out of date term, it is not all is nonsense) sequences between genes. This reduces the total genome mass, without any significant reduction in genetic info.

sgtmyers88 wrote:It would be interesting if they can splice their DNA with humans so we can have the ability to secrete poison and puff up when threatened. LMAO

I know lots of people that puff up when they feel threatened