The ancestors who left memories in our genes

Researchers from the Institute of Biology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris announced that they have “partially reconstructed” the genomes of 624 species that disappeared tens or even hundreds of millions of years ago. This form of “ancestral sequence” Becomethey write, part Basic Research On the development of biology at the molecular level.

Search It was previously published in February on the BioRxiv server.

The idea is not to recreate an entire genome – and even less to bring extinct species back to life – but instead to identify sequences that, in the genomes of today’s animal or plant species, represent a “memory” left over from extinct species.

What’s more, the researchers hope that this method will make it possible to point to a direct ancestor of a current species with greater certainty than a fossil — ancestral lineages are always identified with a good dose of subjectivity.

This is not the first time: in 2017In this way, a British-American team determined the genomes of seven human ancestors who lived in the past 95 million years. But with more than 600 species disappearing at once, this will be the first research to use this method on this scale.