Researchers publish first marsupial genome sequence

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South American opossum
South American opossum

An international team, led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and supported by the National Institutes of Health , today announced the publication of the first genome of a marsupial, belonging to a South American species of opossum. In a comparison of the marsupial genome to genomes of non-marsupials, including human, published in the May 10 issue of the journal Nature, the team found that most innovations leading to the human genome sequence lie not in protein-coding genes, but in areas that until recently were referred to as "junk" DNA.


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