Octopus’ sophistication driven by hundreds of previously unknown genes

arstechnica.com

108 points·Audiophilip··7 comments

I really hope cephalopods survive what we're doing to the oceans. Not to mention farming them for food. The biosphere is a treasure and losing these species would be a loss inexpressible in dollars.

In case you missed it, this out-of-the-water predatory behavior of an octopus is astounding to us mid-west folks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fZu-1bt6Y

If they were really interested in discovering unknown genes, they should have used PacBio to sequence the whole genome instead of just 83% of it via Illumina. That assembly quality ("a contig N50-length of 5.4 kb and a scaffold N50-length of 470 kb") is truly awful compared to a PacBio assembly.

And also about a magnitude more expensive

Not any more, and especially not compared to the HiSeq 2000 used for that paper. PacBio's raw sequencing cost is now about on par with where the HiSeq was when it first launched. And because of the error profile you don't need as much coverage and it's a lot less effort to assemble. So the total project cost now is comparable, even if the raw sequencing cost is higher still.

I have a question: Can genetic information be zipped ? As in a library of words, that restores condensed information to its full density?

Huh, interesting.

To look at that from the other direction... what are the implications if DNA is already optimally compressed?

TBH I'd be surprised if DNA were optimised for size rather than ease of access, but admit that I know next-to-nothing about it.

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