Correct evolutionary relationships among possums

Specialists for the evolutionary history of marsupials: Dr. Jürgen Schmitz and Dr. Liliya Doronina resolved the enigmatic evolutionary relationships among possums © privat Specialists for the evolutionary history of marsupials at the University of Münster undertook a genetic "time travel" back 50 million years The brushtail possum asked the sugar glider, "Are we related?" For many years, science answered "No". For a long time, genetic data provided evidence that the australasiatic possums, the Phalangeroidea (including the brushtail possum) and Petauroidea (including the sugar glider), were divided into two phylogenetic branches without common ancestry. But, the research group of Dr. Jürgen Schmitz and Dr. Liliya Doronina from the Institute of Experimental Pathology at the University of Münster recently found just the opposite. "Following our analyses of jumping genes, it is clear that all possums share a common ancestry" says Schmitz. In the past, morphological data had already hinted at a common origin of Phalngeroidea and Petauroidea, but DNA sequence analyses challenged and undermined these results. In contrast to previous genetic-based studies that examined gene sequences, we analyzed the more reliable insertions of jumping genes. Especially, short interspersed elements (SINEs), which a reliable source for resolving evolutionary relationships among species.