Still another example of what will be the story of the 21st Century - the explosion of genetic revelations. A group at UC Irvine has completed the sequencing of of the genome of Hydra, a freshwater cnidarian polyp well known to zoology students everywhere. They reveal a genome about the same size as that of humans, and sharing many of the same genes. Particularly interesting are genes that, in humans, may play a role in Huntington's disease and Alzheimer's. This makes Hydra a prime candidate for research into those disorders. The paper appears in Nature, or you can read the summary at Science Daily.
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