Takifugu rubripes (the Japanese puffer, Tiger puffer, or torafugu (Japanese: 虎河豚), also known as Fugu rubripes) is a pufferfish in the genus Takifugu. A feature of this species is that it has a very small genome, which is used as a ‘reference’ for identifying genes and other elements in human and other vertebrate genomes. The genome was published in 2002, the first vertebrate genome to be made publicly available after the human genome.