Quick. Would you know a placozoan if it bit you? Not that it actually would attack, unless you were as small as a fleck of algae. And even then, it wouldn’t bite but would instead clamp down and ooze digestive enzymes. Yet this summer, placozoans—the simplest of free-living multicellular animals—and some other, equally nonfamous creatures made the list of targets for the next wave of DNA
sequencing to be funded by the U.S. government. As genome science is expanding in scope, its targets have begun to span the tree of life.
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