( full extent of the importance of these ...)Researchers publish first marsupial genome sequence

full extent of the importance of these non-gene regions is still being revealed. The new results suggest that mammals evolved not so much by inventing new kinds of proteins, as by tweaking the molecular controls that dictate when and where proteins are made.

• Second, many of the new DNA instructions appear to be derived from transposons, or "jumping genes," which are also located in areas once thought to be junk DNA.

"Transposons have a restless lifestyle, often shuttling themselves from one chromosome to another," said the study's first author Tarjei Mikkelsen, a Broad Institute researcher. "It is now clear that in their travels, they are disseminating crucial genetic innovations around the genome."

Other important findings to emerge from the analysis of the opossum genome include:

• The opossum has many genes involved in immunity, challenging the notion that marsupials possess only primitive immune systems.

• The opossum genome has an unusual structure with fewer chromosomes than the human genome (9 pairs versus 23 pairs, respectively) but a longer total length (3.4 billion versus 3 billion bases, respectively).

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Source:NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute


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