And one animal not included “will annoy me to no end,” she said with a laugh. Karlsson recognizes that the 240 studied species, all placental mammals, represent just a tiny slice of living mammals - roughly 4 percent. Sections with lots of changes are interesting too, she says, and can offer clues about how a particular species may be adapting to its environment. Those spots, which have remained mostly unchanged across some 100 million years of evolution, may be parts of the genomes that are “doing something important,” geneticist Elinor Karlsson of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester said in an April 25 news briefing. Some text stayed nearly identical across all species examined, the researchers found. Then, the team lined up the text of each mammal’s book and looked for differences. “It’s a really nice survey of the mammals that are out there,” says Irene Gallego Romero, a human evolutionary geneticist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not a part of the work.įor every one of those mammals, scientists read out the slew of DNA “letters” that make up an animal’s genetic instruction book, or its genome, work first described in 2020.
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