Evidence of Evolution of the Week.

After coming back home, I'm ready once again to give some fun research recently discovered FOR SCIENCE! Ever heard of genomic "fault" zones? I sure hadn't. Until igoogle came up with a few articles on it, so I decided to check it out. As it turns out, in the mammalian genome there are parts that go through a "birth and death" process. This was discovered by a group of bioinformatics researchers at UC San Diego, and was published on November 30, 2010 in the journal Genome Biology.

"The genomic architecture of every species on Earth changes on the evolutionary time scale and humans are not an exception. What will be the next big change in the human genome remains unknown, but our approach could be useful in determining where in the human genome those changes may occur," said Pavel Pevzner, a UC San Diego computer science professor.

Previous studies have shown that there are fragile regions in the genome, which are prone to changing, or "genomic earthquakes." More surprisingly though, as found in this paper, is that these fault zones are moving throughout the genome, meaning that fault zones have a limited evolutionary lifespan. Because these fault zones are isolated to a general area, we can search the human genome for spots of recent activity and see how these spots have effected our evolution. Not only that, but we can make predictions as to what may occur in our, or other mammals, future evolution! (So when people say we can't make predictions, that's complete bull as now we can make more precise predictions on the genomic level and not just phylogenetic level.) With this new insight, the scientists are hopeful that they later may make predictions, based on chromosomal rearrangements, to help cancer diagnosis and treatment.

If you feel like an intrepid young warrior, you may try to tackle the paper. Comparative genomics reveals birth and death of fragile regions in mammalian evolution. My main resource was EurekAlert!

Now when you are told that your logic is faulty, you can say with a straight face that it is.