A school of blue-striped grunt (Haemulon sciurus). As the name implies, this subtropical species makes a grunting sound that's generated when it grinds its teeth together. (Credit: Peter Leahy/Shutterstock)
It has been called “the world’s most dangerous meal,” a fish whose internal organs are laced with one of the deadliest toxins on Earth. Specialized restaurants in Japan and a few other places serve carefully prepared fugu flesh as an expensive delicacy, in part because of this risky thrill.
But Byrappa Venkatesh was drawn to the fugu for an entirely different reason: It has the smallest genome of any vertebrate. That quality was gold back in the 1990s, when geneticists were still racing to sequence the human genome or that of any other vertebrate: Fugu offered a shortcut to the finish line. The puffer was still a slog, though. It cost Venkatesh and his colleagues nine years of hard work and about $10 million, and, in the end, the human genome project nosed them out, just barely, as the first vertebrate genome ever completed.
