One famous dog and a powerful new approach for understanding biology and evolutionary history

 Ever since scientists first read the complete genetic codes of creatures like fruit flies and humans more than two decades ago, the field of genomics has promised major leaps forward in understanding basic questions in biology.

And now comes a major installment of that promise. In what Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and HHMI Professor Beth Shapiro calls a treasure trove of research, more than 150 researchers from 50 institutions are publishing 11 different papers in the April 28, 2023, issue of Science. The research brings new insights from the Zoonomia Project, an unprecedented collaborative effort led by Elinor Karlsson, director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, that compares and analyzes the complete genomes of 240 different mammalian species, from aardvarks to zebus.

The findings from this enormous amount of genetic data include pinpointing genes that underlie the ability to hibernate or how brains grew larger, as well as identifying the small fraction of genes that makes humans unique. "These 11 papers are just a sampling of the type of science that can be done with the new genetic data," says Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "They show how important these large consortia and foundational datasets really are."

Two of the papers, co-authored by Shapiro and her Santa Cruz team, break new ground by showing how much valuable information can be found in genomes of a single species, such as endangered orcas, or even in the DNA of an individual. That individual is a sled dog named Balto, who has been immortalized in movies and a statue for helping to bring lifesaving diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska in an epic journey across the Alaskan wilderness in the winter of 1925. With just a snippet of the dog's preserved skin and "these amazing new techniques we didn't have before, we were able to do this cool scientific thing," says HHMI postdoc Katie Moon, lead author of the Balto paper and a member of Shapiro's team.

Source: ScienceDaily