From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Oct 21 1999 - 08:48:00 MDT
Worth noting is the pullout poster in the Genome issue of Science
(this week). It details how the chromosomes have been sliced and
diced across 21 different species, pointing out those that are
closer in terms of recent evolutionary divergence have the greatest
similarity in their chromosomes.
For example Human 11 ~= Chimp 9 ~= Cow 15 ~= Sheep 15 but as you
get further away, things start turning into hash. The rat
and mouse genomes are *really* reshuffled and the Zebrafish
is totally different. But when all is said and done, we will
have a moderately complete set of the insertions, deletions,
transpositions, breaks, recombinations, etc. that have occured
to produce the different species.
Now of course the creationists will simply say that it was "created"
that way....
It will take us a while to get there, since we are now about to the
point where private+public labs can do about 2 large genomes per year.
But by 2010 or so we should have the major economic crops & animals
done and will have maybe made a dent in those organisms that have
really interesting properties of interest to us (longevity, oxygen
tolerance, limb regrowth, etc.).
Robert
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