Darwin's "Abominable Mystery" is a question biologists still ponder on the reason for the explosion diverse flowering plants in the fossil record. With new advances like "functional phylogenomics", there are new advances in agriculture that are solving the mystery. Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, an evolutionary biologist at Columbia who took part in the research said, “We looked from the macro-evolutionary scale to the single gene scale,” said. They accomplished this feat by tackling the problem from a different angle. Normally, phylogentic trees are constructed from a standard set of genes — or specific sections of DNA that contain instructions for building proteins — that are used to identify similarities between species.
Instead, the researchers adopted an umbrella approach, analyzing 150 plants’ genomes — that is, the biological information needed to build an organism. With the help of supercomputers, the researchers used new algorithms to analyze nearly 23,000 sets of genes and identify similarities between species.
Is this post extending as I write or is it just me?
The benefits from this technology is an ability to detect genetic attributes that raise pesticide and pathogen resistance, improve crop efficiency and increase drought resistance.
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