Conservation Status and Current Population of the African Clawed Frog Although the African Clawed Frog is classed as being at Low Risk of extinction, population numbers have decreased in certain locations owing to declining water quality. Elsewhere in the planet, African Clawed Frog populations have often become non-native pests of indigenous flora and species.
"I reasoned that studying 'transposable elements' (DNA segments that travel across the genome) that become fixed or inactive over time could be one method to trace the two ancestral genomes present in X. laevis as subgenomes," Taira explains.
Dr. Akira Hikosaka of Hiroshima University and Dr. Yoshinobu Uno of Nagoya University were his co-authors when he offered this notion. They validated Taira's hypothesis and revealed that two distinct sets of chromosomes did indeed arise from distinct diploid progenitors.
"I was honestly astonished that no one had done this research before us," said Vance Vredenburg, a conservation biologist at San Francisco State University and primary author of the new study, which was published in the journal PLoS ONE on May 15.
That might be because laboratories like his have been in crisis mode, seeking to discover a means to resist the fungus and rescue as many frogs as possible, rather than attempting to decipher the fungus's origins.
NARRATOR: Due of its importance in research laboratories, when scientists at the Joint Genome Institute wanted to sequence a frog, they picked Xenopus over indigenous frogs and Tropicalis over its uglier relative to simplify the task. Tropicalis has two copies of each gene, while Laevis has four copies of each gene. UTTE HELLSTEN: Therefore, if you're going to sequence a frog, why not select one that has already been correctly defined and combine our enormous understanding of the frog's embryology with genuine genetic insight?
