Tammar wallaby young spend nine months in their mother's pouch 
 
 Researchers have laid bare the DNA of a kangaroo species for the first time. 
 
 An international team of scientists, writing in the Biomed Central journal, Genome Biology, say they have even indentified a gene responsible for the kangaroo's hop. 
 
 The group focussed on a small species of kangaroo that inhabits islands off Australia's south and western coasts. 
 
 The tammar wallaby (Macropus eugenii) is only the third marsupial to have its genome sequenced. 
 
 Making up the trio are the Tasmanian devil and the South American opossum. 
 
 The team says the first kangaroo genome is a milestone in the study of mammalian evolution. The ancestors of kangaroos and other marsupials diverged from other mammals at least 130 million years ago. 
 
 Professor Marilyn Renfree of the University of Melbourne, a lead researcher on the project, said: "The tammar wallaby sequencing project has provided us with many possibilities for understanding how marsupials are different from us." 
 
 Key marsupial traits 
 
 Dr Elizabeth Murchison, a marsupial specialist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, described the study as "a wonderful tool for studying the evolution of marsupials, and mammals in general, and an impressive piece of work looking at one of Australia's iconic species." 
 
 Aside from identifying the "hop" gene, the researchers pinpointed the genes responsible for other key marsupial traits. 
 
 For example, tammar wallaby young are only the size of a grain of rice when born. They spend the next stage of their development in their mother's pouch, feeding on her milk. 
 
 The pouch is external to the mother's body and therefore the developing animal comes under attack from many pathogens. Antibiotics in the mother's milk are key to the survival of the offspring. 
 
 This is only the third marsupial genome to be sequenced 
 
 Dr Murchison told BBC News: "It's always really valuable to look at an organism that is a bit different to understand how humans and other mammals have evolved. 
 
 "It gives you a perspective on mammalian evolution by looking at mammals that have diverged fairly early on, like the kangaroo. 
 
 The researchers also studied the way tammar wallaby genes are turned "on" or "off" at different stages of the animal's life cycle and in different parts of the body. 
 
 They hope their work may help produce future treatments for human disease. 
 
 "This is the first genome project to be led by Australian scientists," commented Dr Murchison. 
 
 "It's been a huge project. It's been going on for almost my entire career. I'm from Australia and it was going on when I was an undergraduate there 10 years ago. 
 
 "It was a very early conceived genome project and it has evolved through various different stages as genome sequencing technologies have changed a lot. The team has adapted and kept up and so they have a huge amount of data." e. ||||| Finding gives hope that the carnivorous marsupials could survive devil facial tumour disease, which was predicted to make them extinct in the wild 
 
 Within just a handful of generations, Tasmanian devils appear to have evolved resistance to an unusual contagious cancer that was widely expected to make the ill-tempered carnivorous marsupials extinct in the wild. 
 
 The remarkable finding gives hope that the unique animals could survive the disease, which has already wiped out 80% of the animals in just a few decades. It could also give scientists an insight into human cancer. 
 
 First detected in 1996, devil facial tumour disease is one of just three transmissible cancers seen outside the laboratory. It kills virtually every animal it infects and has spread across 95% of Tasmania, affecting almost every known devil population. 
 
 Despite models suggesting some long-infected populations of the devils should have been extinct by now, most were clinging on. That led Andrew Storfer from Washington State University and his colleagues to suspect that those populations might have evolved some degree of resistance to the disease. 
 
 Unusually for research of this kind, the scientists had access to tissue samples collected from Tasmanian devils from several points in time, including before the devil populations were infected. 
 
 Tasmanian devils can catch second strain of facial cancer, say researchers Read more 
 
 Menna Jones, a co-author on the study from the University of Tasmania, had collected nearly 10,000 tissue samples since 1999, allowing the team to compare the DNA of populations before, during and after disease arrival. 
 
 The researchers examined the genomes of almost 300 individuals from three different populations, looking for genes that changed in frequency over that time. 
 
 “Our hope was that we would find some genes that were perhaps associated with cancer or resistance to cancer or immune function,” said Storfer. “And in fact we did find seven different genes in two small regions of the genome that seem to have implications for cancers in other animals, including humans.” 
 
 Storfer said some of those genes thought to be involved in directing immune cells to attack dysfunctional cells or pathogens were particularly promising. If they do help confer resistance to the cancer, it meant the immune system might be evolving to recognise and attack the tumour cells. 
 
 Since the same changes were seen in three independent populations, the researchers said it was very unlikely that they were a result of a more random process. 
 
 Storfer said the next step was to try to figure out exactly what those genes do in Tasmanian devils. He said the team was growing the tumour cells in the lab and were editing their genome to examine the influence of the genes on their growth. 
 
 The researchers said it was unlikely these genes made animals completely resistant, but they might allow the devils to survive long enough to reproduce. 
 
 They said the finding of such fast resistance – occurring between four and six generations – to highly lethal disease in wild populations was unique. The only other example was rabbit resistance to myxomatosis in Australia, but that occurred over many more generations. 
 
 “First and foremost … this gives us hope for the survival of the Tasmanian devil, which was predicted to be extinct but isn’t,” said Storfer. 
 
 Other researchers in Australia, including Greg Woods from the University of Tasmania, have been trialling a promising vaccine against the devil facial tumour disease. 
 
 “This research provides support for vaccine research as devils appear to respond to the tumours,” Woods said. “This will require functional data to confirm.” 
 
 Smoke signals: DNA adaptation helped early humans deal with toxic fumes Read more 
 
 Devil facial tumour disease is one of just three known contagious cancers that exist in the wild. 
 
 About 11,000 years ago, dogs developed canine transmissible venereal tumours, which is usually not lethal, suggesting they might have developed resistance to it. And just this year, it was discovered that mussels, clams and other bivalves have a contagious cancer that is similar to leukaemia, which can even spread between species. 
 
 Storfer said contagious cancers in animals, and resistance to them, could help understand the causes of different responses to human cancer. Since the same cancer line is spread from one animal to the next, it is like studying a very long-lived cancer in a single patient. 
 
 “So this may give us some insights into cancer remission and recurrence in humans,” Storfer said. 
 
 The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.
– What makes the kangaroo hop? That’s just one of the questions answered by international researchers who’ve decoded the genome of a kangaroo species, the BBC reports. The genome research team—the first to be led by Australian scientists—sequenced the genome in 2008 but finally completed its analysis of it and published those findings last week. "It's been a huge project," says one scientist. "I'm from Australia and it was going on when I was an undergraduate there 10 years ago." The decoding gives scientists a clearer picture of mammalian evolution and could help cure diseases, both in humans and other mammals. Kangaroo milk has antibiotic properties, and researchers have copied it to synthesize a protein that kills bacteria already resistant to antibiotics, the Australian reports. The findings could lead to a vaccine to fend off a facial tumor that has ravaged Tasmanian devil populations—though such a medication could be a decade away.