This aspect of the organism could be particularly interesting to the medical field, according to Prochnik. Because the organism’s and human cells’ flagellate tails are exactly the same, the two can be related.“When flagellates go wrong it causes problems like blindness, kidney diseases, obesity and developmental defects,” he said. “So the more we learn about (the organism’s) flagellates, the more we can help (fix these problems).”The project began in 2004 when UC Berkeley researchers requested the organism’s genome be sequenced by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute.
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