What is it about?
Remnants of extinct monkeys are hiding inside you, along with those of lizards, jelly fish, and other animals. Your DNA is built upon gene fragments from primal ancestors. Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made it more likely that ancestral genes, along with ancestral proteins, can be confidently identified and reconstructed. They have benchmarked a vital tool that would seem nearly impossible to benchmark. The newly won confidence in the tool could also help scientists use ancient gene sequences to synthesize better proteins to battle diseases. For some 20 years, scientists have used algorithms to compute their way hundreds of millions of years back into the evolutionary past. Starting with present-day gene sequences, they perform what’s called ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) to determine past mutations and figure out the genes’ primal forerunners.
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Why is it important?
Protein engineering of therapeutic drugs smartly designed to account historical contingency.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An experimental phylogeny to benchmark ancestral sequence reconstruction, Nature Communications, September 2016, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12847.
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