The awesome opossum gets sequenced

Monodelphis domestica bags the first marsupial genome.Such a small creature for so great an honour: the grey short-tailed opossum is the first marsupial to have its genome fully sequenced, joining a menagerie of other mammals including the mouse, rat, chimpanzee and, of course, human. "The opossum is a wonderful comparison to the human genome," says Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a contributor to the study, which was completed by a consortium of researchers from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada and is presented in this week's Nature. Whole article "Nature":[ http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070508/full/070508-8.html]

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