Elephant Shark Genome Project

Cartilaginous fishes (Chondrichthyes) represented by sharks, rays, skates and chimaeras, are phylogenetically the oldest group of living jawed vertebrates. They constitute an important group for our understanding of the origins of the complex developmental and physiological systems of jawed vertebrates. They are also an useful outgroup for bony vertebrates such as tetrapods and teleost fishes and help in identifying specialized features that have led to the evolution of diverse groups of bony vertebrates. The elephant shark (Callorhinchus milii), also known as the elephant fish and ghost shark, is a chimaera belonging to the Order Chimaeriformes and Family Callorhynchidae. It has the smallest genome among the known cartilaginous fish genomes. Thus, it was proposed as a model cartilaginous fish genome for whole-genome sequencing and comparative analysis (Venkatesh et al. 2005. Curr. Biol. 15: R82-R83). To explore the elephant shark genome, we have conducted a survey-sequencing and comparative analysis of the elephant shark genome in collaboration with J. Craig Venter Institute. The elephant shark sequences generated under this project have been deposited at GenBank under the project accession number AAVX01000000. The sequences can also be searched using BLAST and retrieved here.