More Phylogenetics

I came across science writer Carl Zimmer's excellent blog "The Loom" for the first time today. Take the time to read through his entire site.

If you enjoyed the Gene Expression article I linked to last week, you should definitely read Zimmer's October 26 entry on mapping evolutionary trees. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed the phylogeny of seven species of yeast whose genomes had been completely sequenced. Using a set of 106 genes, they were able to map the evolutionary family tree of the yeast with 100% confidence at each node. More importantly, they were able to achieve the same result by paring down the number of genes examined to 20.

It will be interesting to see how this technique can be extended to more complex organisms in the coming years.