Genomes

The beloved pooch snoring on your couch or sticking a snoot under your arm at dinner time came from a much wilder origin. At some point, dogs diverged from gray wolves under the guidance of domestication, to become the diverse fuzzbutts that fill our homes and hearts with such joy today.  Exactly when and how this process took place, however, is something of a mystery. Now ancient DNA, including that of wolves preserved in permafrost for tens of thousands of years, is shedding some light on how wild wolves became some of…

Spotting a wispy sea dragon, floating amongst the seaweed, embellished with leaf-like adornments ruffling in swaying ocean currents, is truly a sight to behold.But there is more to sea dragons than meets the diver's eye. Bedazzled as they may be, sea dragons are also missing teeth, lacking ribs, and their spines are curved and kinked.  Now, scientists have found genetic clues that might explain why sea dragons appear so strikingly distinctive – not only are their genomes packed with repetitive chunks of DNA that drive…

Shapiro’s Nature Ecology study also focused on what may have happened to other polar bear genomes during periods of low ice—in this case, around 120,000 or 125,000 years ago when, according to Shapiro, Arctic ice levels were similar to the present day’s. But here, she looked at the relationship between polar bears and brown bears. Her team constructed a phylogenetic tree—sort of like an evolutionary map showing how the bears diverged from a common ancestor over time—using Bruno’s genome and those of currently living polar…

Cats do not have perfect genes—our furry feline pals can inherit devastating genetic diseases. Key disease-causing versions of genes have been discovered with the rise of cat genome sequencing. And pedigree breeding can exacerbate the genetic troubles cat breeds face. Now the largest ever genetic study of domestic cats reveals the frequency with which the known disease-causing versions of genes, or gene variants, pop up in pedigreed cat breeds and their nonpedigreed cousins. More than 11,000 cats were screened for…

Facial reconstruction of four Ancient Korean individuals based on Ancient DNA data. Credit: Current Biology An international team led by The University of Vienna and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in collaboration with the National Museum of Korea has successfully sequenced and studied the whole genome of eight 1,700-year-old individuals dated to the Three Kingdoms period of Korea (approx. 57 BC–668…

View of the Tian Shan mountains. Studying ancient plague genomes, researchers traced the origins of the Black Death to Central Asia, close to Lake Issyk Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan. Credit: © Lyazzat Musralina In 1347, plague first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships transporting goods from the territories of the Golden Horde in the Black Sea. The disease then disseminated across Europe, the Middle East and northern…

New research shows that sperm production is critical to how regions of the genome are re-organized within and between chromosomes during evolution. In particular, inherited chromosomal rearrangements are associated with physical and biochemical processes that are specific to the final stages of sperm production, after the meiotic cell divisions have completed.A study led by researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the University of Kent uncovers how the genome three-dimensional structure of male germ…

The Atlantic longfin inshore squid, Doryteuthis pealeii, has been studied for nearly a century by scientists as a model system for neuroscience investigations. Credit: Elaine BearerSquid, octopus, and cuttlefish – even to scientists who study them – are wonderfully weird creatures. Known as the soft-bodied or coleoid cephalopods, they have the largest nervous system of any invertebrate, complex behaviors such as instantaneous camouflage, arms studded with dexterous suckers, and other evolutionarily unique traits.Now,…