A team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz Genomics Institute has created the first complete genome of a species of monkey, which will enable vital research into dementia and other diseases.
Understanding Disease
To study complex diseases such as Alzheimer’s, researchers analyze how genes change and malfunction in other species. Marmosets, a species of tiny tree-dwelling monkey from South America, have become an important animal to study for understanding disease.
The first complete genome of the common marmoset is now available to the scientific community, thanks to the research team led by doctoral student Prajna Hebbar and Benedict Paten. Their work, published in the journal Cell, means researchers will be able to study marmoset genetics with high accuracy and detail, revealing unseen features and enabling future insights into disease and evolution.
Advancements in Genomics
The researchers used new algorithms for highly accurate genome assembly pioneered by the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium, a collaborative, multi-institution effort to create high-quality, truly complete reference genomes. The T2T approach is becoming routine enough to be applied not just to human genomes, but to different species.
The complete genome also revealed that marmosets shuffle sets of ribosomal DNA (rDNA) between chromosomes more freely than expected, gaining and losing whole arrays on individual chromosomes in ways not previously documented in primates.
Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.
