A study led by Daniel Rokhsar, the Marthella Foskett Brown Chair in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oleg Simakov of the University of Vienna in Austria, is the first to compare the chromosomal position of genes from diverse animals, such as sponges, jellyfish, sea scallops and other aquatic invertebrates, allowing the ancestral organization to be inferred and rare changes in chromosome organization to be studied. The study’s findings remind us that evolution is conservative — it keeps things that work well, like the organization of genes on a chromosome — and provides a key link between creatures alive today, including humans, and our very distant ancestors.
Read more about it here.
