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Discuss “Carnegie Mellon scientist helps to crack purple sea urchin genome”

When it comes to genetics, looks can be deceiving. On the surface, sea urchins appear to share little in common with humans, but on the inside, these organisms could provide insight into the beginnings of human growth.

In fact, thanks to Carnegie Mellon biology professor Charles Ettensohn, you may never look at sea urchins the same way again.

Ettensohn worked alongside 200 researchers worldwide to discover the genome of the California purple sea urchin. He provided researchers with 51,000 complementary DNAs (cDNAs), or about one-third of the genomic information necessary to sequence the genome.

cDNA is so called because its sequence of bases is the complement of a given DNA sequence. By finding the DNA sequence’s complement, scientists...

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