Daphnia: The next genome

Daphnia is a freshwater crustacean that lives in several aquatic environments like swamps, lakes and rivers.

Aquarist knows them well since they are used as food for many aquatic organisms including various fish species, and are sold by aquatic retailers.

It's little known, outside scientific community, that these "water flea" are also used as model species.Daphnia shares a place with the lat rat, the fruit fly, the e. coli, zebrafish, among others. Those organism are extensively studied since is expected that discoveries made in them will provide insight into the workings of other organisms.

Why Daphnia is useful as model organism? The main features are:

• Its short reproductive cycle is ideal for experimental genetics.Daphnia reach maturity within 5 - 10 days.
• Daphnia are transparent throughout life, thus providing a very useful feature for studies of tissue-specific gene expression.
• They have a relatively small genome size, approximately twice the size of Drosophila, making it one of the smallest crustacean genomes measured to date.
• The sexually produced diapausing eggs can be stored viably for considerable periods of time

Most important: Daphni is also considered an indicator specie, that means that it is an indicator of ecosystem health.

The Daphnia Genomics Consortium anounced that they released the Daphnia genome sequence in public early access. The final sequence is expected by 2008, but this draft sequence is useful in many areas of genome research.

Lets welcome the first crustacean genome onboard!