An international collaboration called the Zoonomia Project analyzed the genomes of 240 mammals, offering insights into evolution, extinction, the human brain and a famous, life-saving sled dog.
nearly a century later, Balto’s genetic blueprint is entering the annals of science, thanks to a massive new project that seeks to rewrite our understanding of mammalian evolution, unlocking knowledge that may help treat human disease and stave off species extinction.
“This is really an unprecedented view of the evolutionary history of mammalian genomes,” said Maria Chikina, an assistant professor of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who was not involved in the research. “We now know which parts of the genome are important in building a mammal.”Scientists first sequenced the human genome two decades ago in one of this century’s biggest scientific breakthroughs.
For instance, paleontologists and molecular biologists “used to fight like hell” over when the age of mammals started, said Nicole Foley, a scientist at Texas A&M and lead author of one of the Zoonomia papers. For a while, fossil collections seemed to suggest mammals split into different species after an asteroid wiped out most dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
One research team studied more than 10,000 short sections of genetic code that are found in all other mammals but not in humans ― a step toward understanding what makes us distinct from other species. The team’s work paves the way for scientists to better understand the impact of deletions by reproducing them in the brains of mice, or in artificial human or chimpanzee brains called organoids.only scratches the surface of the mammalian tree. The one elephant, 43 primates, 53 rodents and more than 100 other creatures sampled represent less than 1 percent of all living mammals.“There’s one species we’re missing in there that will annoy me to no end, which is just the raccoon.
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