GENOMESLast week, the U.S. government plunked down about $60 million in new money to have three labs start sequencing the rat genome. The rat is needed, researchers say, because it has been used more than the mouse for studies of physiology. Nailing down this new genome will be almost as daunting as sequencing the human genome in draft form, however, because rodents also have 3 billion base pairs of DNA.
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Eliot Marshall (2001) studied this question.