Tammar Wallaby)
PROPOSAL TO SEQUENCE THE GENOME OF THE MODEL MARSUPIAL MACROPUS EUGENII (TAMMAR WALLABY) Jennifer A. Marshall Graves1, Matthew J. Wakefield1, Marilyn B. Renfree2, Desmond W. Cooper 3, Terry Speed4, Kerstin Lindblad-Toh5, Eric S. Lander5 and Richard K. Wilson6 1Australian National University, Canberra; 2Melbourne University; 3Macquarie University, Sydney; 4Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne; and University of California, Berkeley, 5Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome research, Cambridge, MA; 6Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO I. Overview Marsupials were regarded as curiosities by their early European discoverers, animals to be wondered at. Nevertheless, it was recognised very early that they could make a major contribution to our understanding of reproductive processes, and indeed marsupial research led the field of reproduction during the first half of the 20th century. Marsupials are mammals, but represent a 100+ million year isolate from eutherian (“placental”) mammals. This makes them particularly valuable “alternative mammals” for comparative studies, and their inclusion has dealt many blows to basic genetic and reproductive hypotheses. They are equally valuable for enlarging and enhancing our understanding of the mammalian genome, being distant enough from mice and man, but closer to them than chicken or fugu. The tammar wallaby, a small kangaroo species, is a thoroughly typical Australian marsupial. Its size, availability and ease of handling make it the most intensively studied model marsupial for anatomical and physiological studies, especially of reproduction and development. Considerable genetic and cytological data, as well as genomic resources, are available for this species. The tammar genome comprises about 3.6 Gb, with a relatively short genetic map length of 1172 cM.
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