Assembly V4.0: The A. mexicanum transcriptome has been deep sequenced (15,000,000 Roche 454 short sequence reads and 50K Sanger reads) and assembled. The resulting assembly V4.0 can now be BLAST searched here. Approximately 89.9% of the 14 million high quality sequences were assembled into contigs with a total length of 542 Mb.

Fun Facts

What determines whether an axolotl will grow up to be male or female?

Axolotls have genetic sex-determination - a locus on an axolotl chromosome determines whether an axolotl is male or female.

In salamanders, the sex determining mechanism is referred to as ZZ/ZW and the heterogametic sex is female.

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