Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Blogging earlier on the platypus What's Our Connection to the Platypus? here is some think i came across, a very interesting compilation on the history of the mystery mammal. I have always thought and fancied a platypus in the place of TUX the Linux mascot, every time i see tux i don't think of a penguin but a platypus! may be tux to me looks more like a platypus than a penguin! A nice item, a brief history of the platypus, in 5 parts that's just brilliant. Further interesting is the foot note "Further reading" don't miss it. This is a wonderful historical account and should be made more widely available. For Quick reach here : Genome analysis of the platypus reveals unique signatures of evolution. Nature 453: 175-183. Abstract | Full text Relevant abstracts from Genome Research Platypus Genome Special Hall, B.K. (1999). The Paradoxical Platypus. BioScience 49(3): 211-218. JSTOR link This is a wonderful historical account and should be made more...

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...