Muffato Matthieu, Roest Crollius Hugues
Ecole Normale Supérieure, Dyogen Group, Paris, France.
Bioessays. 2008 Feb;30(2):122-34. doi: 10.1002/bies.20707.
Knowledge of the structure of ancestral genomes provides the basis of a new framework to better represent and interpret results from genomic and evolutionary studies. Because these ancestors lived tens of hundreds of million years ago, this knowledge will inevitably take the form of abstract representations, reconstructed on the basis both of experimental evidence collected on extant genomes and of our understanding of evolutionary processes. This is the field of Paleogenomics, a young discipline that is providing an increasingly precise picture of our ancestral vertebrate genomes based on cytogenetic data, genome sequences and new algorithmic developments. Many recent studies have focused on the ancestral placental mammal and teleost fish genomes, although the outlines of even more distant pre-vertebrate ancestors are being reported.
对祖先基因组结构的了解为一个新框架提供了基础，以便更好地呈现和解释基因组学与进化研究的结果。由于这些祖先生活在数亿年前，这种认知必然会采取抽象表征的形式，它是在基于现存基因组收集的实验证据以及我们对进化过程的理解基础上重建的。这就是古基因组学领域，这一新兴学科正基于细胞遗传学数据、基因组序列和新的算法发展，为我们呈现出越来越精确的脊椎动物祖先基因组图谱。尽管更远的脊椎动物前体祖先的轮廓也有报道，但最近许多研究都聚焦于胎盘哺乳动物和硬骨鱼的祖先基因组。
