Each fall millions of monarch butterflies from across the eastern United States use a time-compensated sun compass to direct their navigation south, traveling up to 2,000 miles to an overwintering site in a specific grove of fir trees in central Mexico. Scientists have long been fascinated by the biological mechanisms that allow successive generations of these delicate creatures to transverse such long distances to a small region roughly 300 square miles in size. To unlock the genetic and regulatory elements important for this remarkable journey, neurobiologists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) are the first to sequence and analyze the monarch butterfly genome.
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