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Some stats and facts about the #Takifugu #rubripes assembly by @genomeark: this is the third iteration of the assembly. The first was completed in 2002. There was another iteration done in 2011. Why was the pufferfish sequenced so early? A lot has got to do with Sydney Brenner... 
Indeed, as we can see in this archived version of @ensembl, the Fugu genome was the 5th vertebrate genome to be completed, after human/mouse/rat and zebrafish. Even though zebrafish is widely used as a model organism, Sydney Brenner argued that Fugu was worth sequencing ...
... The reason is that Sydney Brenner was passionate (obsessed?) with gene duplications and functional diversification. I.e. a gene duplicates in two copies, and over time, each copy can specialize in doing something slightly different. ...
