Improved method for comparing genomes as well as written text |
28 January 2009 BERKELEY — Taking a hint from the text
comparison methods used to detect plagiarism in books, college
papers and computer programs, University of California,
Berkeley, researchers have developed an improved method for
comparing whole genome sequences. With nearly a thousand genomes
partly or fully sequenced, scientists are jumping on comparative
genomics as a way to construct evolutionary trees, trace disease
susceptibility in populations, and even track down people's
ancestry. To date, the most common techniques have relied on
comparing a limited number of highly conserved genes - no more
than a couple dozen - in organisms that have all these genes in
common. The new method can be used to compare even distantly
related organisms or organisms with genomes of vastly different
sizes and diversity, and can compare the entire genome, not just
a selected small fraction of the gene-containing portion known
to code for proteins, which in