June 26, 2025
Yafei Mao’s group from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and co-authors published a paper in Nature to analyze the complex structural variations in the Macaca fascicularis to facilitate ev
Macaca fascicularis and Macaca mulatta are the most commonly used non-human primates in experimental research and are widely utilized in biomedical and human evolutionary studies due to their close genetic affinity to humans (having diverged around 25 million years ago), particularly in the fields of human trait formation, disease modeling, and drug metabolism. Their reference genome has been widely applied in these studies, especially in understanding human characteristic trait formation, disease modeling, and drug metabolism. However, the existing reference genomes still contain many unknown sequences, particularly in the regions of the centromere, segmental duplications (SDs), and ribosomal DNA (rDNA), which limits the in-depth exploration of primate evolutionary mechanisms and their biomedical value.