Frog genes

From a genetic point of view, frogs and humans are first cousins. This is the conclusion reached by an international team of researchers, who have decoded for the first time the genome of an amphibian, the African frog Xenopus tropicalis . The animal has around 21,000 genes, of which more than 1,700 are very similar to those of humans . By comparison, our genome has about 23,000 genes, said the researchers, whose work has been published in the US journal Science .

" Xenopus is very promising and should become a very powerful research model to help us better understand how our own genes work," explained Jacques Robert, an immunologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, New York and co-author of the study. .

On the other hand, the availability of the Xenopus genome opens the possibility of studying the effects of certain substances that mimic hormonal function and whose presence in aquifers could be the cause of a reduction in the populations that these amphibians are suffering throughout the world .

This little frog thus joins the list of more than 175 organisms whose genome has been decoded since 2001 , including humans, bee, cow, chicken, rat and mouse.