Yet despite the risk, fugu dishes-especiallyblowfish soup-areconsidered great delicacies.

Up to five Japanese die from badly prepared fugu every year.

Clare, the attraction of fugu doesn't have anything to do with eating the stuff.

But fugu-focussed restaurants hope the Olympics, and the hordes of tourists they will bring, will revive business.

With fugu, it isn't the taste, either.

Preparing it is so dangerous the chefs have to have a special license to serve fugu in Japan.

Two prolactin receptors (PRLRs) encoded by two different genes were identified in the fugu and zebrafish genomes but not in the genomes of other vertebrates.

Dragging files to a remote computer in Fugu

For this purpose we have sequenced a human and a Fugu cosmid clone containing the corresponding L1 genes.

The human and Fugu L1 gene both have 28 exons of nearly identical size.

Furukawa, who is also the president of International Fugu Association, said wealthy tourists were a big part of his market.

"It's a neurotoxin, called TTX for short, found in fugu."

As I stepped out of the car, I could see that the "Fugu thrill-seekers" were still out in full force.

"Fugu is Japanese puffer fish," I explained.

Homology at the amino acid and the nucleotide level with 40% and 51%, respectively, is lower than that of any previously reported Fugu gene.