What's Our Connection to the Platypus?
The platypus ( Ornithorhynchus anatinus ) is endemic to Australia and one of nature's oddest creatures, seemingly assembled from the spare parts of other animals. The semi-aquatic monotreme is a venomous, duck-billed mammal that lays eggs, nurses its young and occupies a lonely twig at the end of a sparse branch of the vertebrate evolutionary tree. The ancient, patchworked platypus is a relatively unchanged animal that may be a scientific boon for researchers, who are learning a lot from its recently decoded genome about mammalian gene regulation and immune systems, which could have huge implications for human disease susceptibility research. Professor Jenny Graves, at Australian National University (ANU), Canberra explains the findings, in an interview with Anna Buckley from BBC World Service's Science in Action programme . This mix-and-match animal is more than just an oddity, though. Researchers report in Nature that its genome provides important clues into how mammals, bird...