Injectable nanogel can monitor blood-sugar levels and secrete
insulin when needed. The wheels of evolution turn on genetic
innovation -- new genes with new functions appear, allowing
organisms to grow and adapt in new ways. But deciphering the
history of how and when various genes appeared, for any
organism, has been a difficult and largely intractable task. Now
a team led by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and
Harvard has broken new ground by developing a method, described
in the September 6 advance online edition of Nature, that can
reveal the ancestry of all genes across many different genomes.
First applied to 17 species of fungi, the approach has unearthed
some surprising clues about why new genes pop up in the first
place and the biological nips and tucks that bolster their
survival. "Having the ability to trace the history of genes on a
genomic scale opens the doors to a vast array of interesting and
largely unexplored scientific questions," said senior author
Aviv Regev, an assistant professo