“When you look at segments of the Xenopus genome, you literally are looking at structures that are 360 million years old and were part of the genome of the last common ancestor of all birds, frogs, dinosaurs and mammals that ever roamed the Earth,” said study leader Uffe Hellsten of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif. “Chromosome archaeology helps [us] to understand the history of evolution, showing us how the genetic material has rearranged itself to create the present-day mammalian genome and present-day amphibian genome.”
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