In an advance, online publication of Nature this week, an international research team reports their sequencing and analysis of the freshwater cnidarian Hydra magnipapillata genome, as compared to the genomes of the anthozoan Nematostella vectensis and other animals: "The Hydra genome has been shaped by bursts of transposable element expansion, horizontal gene transfer, trans-splicing, and simplification of gene structure and gene content that parallel si