The Syntenic Relationship of the Zebrafish and Human Genomes

  1. W. Bradley Barbazuk1,3,
  2. Ian Korf1,
  3. Candy Kadavi1,
  4. Joshua Heyen1,
  5. Stephanie Tate1,
  6. Edmund Wun2,
  7. Joseph A. Bedell1,
  8. John D. McPherson1, and
  9. Stephen L. Johnson2,4
  1. 1Washington University School of Medicine Genome Sequencing Center, St. Louis, Missouri 63108 USA; 2Department of Genetics, Washington University Medical School, St. Louis, Missouri 63130 USA

Abstract

The zebrafish is an important vertebrate model for the mutational analysis of genes effecting developmental processes. Understanding the relationship between zebrafish genes and mutations with those of humans will require understanding the syntenic correspondence between the zebrafish and human genomes. High throughput gene and EST mapping projects in zebrafish are now facilitating this goal. Map positions for 523 zebrafish genes and ESTs with predicted human orthologs reveal extensive contiguous blocks of synteny between the zebrafish and human genomes. Eighty percent of genes and ESTs analyzed belong to conserved synteny groups (two or more genes linked in both zebrafish and human) and 56% of all genes analyzed fall in 118 homology segments (uninterrupted segments containing two or more contiguous genes or ESTs with conserved map order between the zebrafish and human genomes). This work now provides a syntenic relationship to the human genome for the majority of the zebrafish genome.

Footnotes

  • 3 Present address: Monsanto World Headquarters, St. Louis, Missouri 63167 USA.

  • 4 Corresponding author.

  • E-MAIL sjohnson{at}genetics.wustl.edu; FAX (314) 362-7855.

  • Article and publication are at www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.144700.

    • Received April 20, 2000.
    • Accepted June 20, 2000.
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