Scientists have reconstructed the genome of the common ancestor of all mammals

All modern mammals, from the platypus to the blue whale, descended from a common ancestor who lived around 180

million years ago.Little is known about him, but an international team of researchers has reconstructed his genome using computer technology. The results of the study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The results of the study have important implications for understanding the evolution of mammals and for conservation efforts.

The researchers used high qualitygenome sequences of 32 living species. They represent 23 of the 26 known orders of mammals. Among them were humans and chimpanzees, wombats and rabbits, manatees, livestock, rhinoceroses, bats and pangolins. The analysis also included chicken and Chinese alligator genomes as comparison groups. Some of these are being produced by the Earth BioGenome Project and other large-scale biodiversity genome sequencing projects.

The earliest mammal ancestor is probablylooked like this fossil animal, Morganucodon. It lived about 200 million years ago. Credit: Wikipedia, Funkmonk, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

The reconstruction showed that the ancestorthe mammal had 19 autosomal chromosomes. They are responsible for the inheritance of body characteristics beyond those controlled by the sex-linked chromosomes (these are paired in most cells, adding up to 38), plus the two sex chromosomes.

Biologists have identified 1,215 gene blocks thatconsistently found on the same chromosome in the same order in all 32 genomes. These building blocks of all mammalian genomes contain genes that are critical for the development of a normal embryo, scientists say.

The researchers also discovered nine completechromosomes or fragments of chromosomes in an ancestor of a mammal whose gene order is the same as in the chromosomes of modern birds. The study shows the evolutionary stability of the order and orientation of genes on chromosomes over a long period of evolution, which amounts to more than 320 million years.

On the contrary, the areas between these conservativeblocks contained more repetitive sequences and were more prone to breakdowns, rearrangements, and sequence duplications. They are the main driving forces of genome evolution.

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