NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Sequencing the complete electric eel genome would be a boon to research on everything from energy production and storage to tissue regeneration, according to some scientists.

Six American researchers wrote a review, published this month in the Journal of Fish Biology, calling for dense, seven- to 11-fold shotgun sequencing of the electric eel genome — a move they said would provide information about more than 95 percent of the fish’s genome as well as its genetic scaffold.

Electric eels, Electrophorus electricus, can generate bioelectricity from chemical food energy using specialized electric organs. These contain electrically-charged cells that, in turn, house precisely regulated ion channels and receptors. Together, this system lets electric eels generate electrical pulses ranging from weak, millivolt discharges to strong zaps up to 600 volts.

Although a library of E. electricus expressed sequence is reportedly in the works, lead author James Albert, a biologist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and his colleagues argued that access to whole-genome information will not only provide information about coding and non-coding regions of the eel genome, but also will facilitate the production of DNA microchips for gene expression experiments.

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By a GenomeWeb staff reporter