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Computational Genomics
blamanj writes "Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have been using computational techniques to 'reverse engineer' the DNA of extinct species. David Haussler and colleagues created a hypothetical portion of ancestral mammalian DNA and let a computer model simulate the process of evolution. Then they made their algorithm work backward from these descendants, to see if it could recreate the original ancestor."
It does sound a bit fishy... I just attended a lecture on DNA-focused biophysics the other day, and they were all about "we won't be able to compute it for years, but..." And by the way, as the article said, we're quite a bit behind the rodents in losing bases... let's make babies :)
Since the accuracy with which the artificial genome was recreated in the simulation isn't compared with that of other methods for doing the same thing, the 98% figure doesn't tell us much. For all I know, that could be the accuracy you would get using any method (but I suppose the scientists actually have more simulation data than was presented in the article).
Likewise, comparing that number to the degree of genome similarity between humans and chimps isn't very meaningful either. Since the article doesn't mention chimpanzees but rather rats and pigs, I suppose the research is focused on longer periods of evolution than the few million years that have passed since the split between humans and chimps.
By the way, is the 98% difference in relation to all human DNA, or merely to the part of the genome that is identical among all humans? I don't know how much of a difference that makes, but I believe there is a difference.
I would compare it to analyzing languages spoken today to determine how the language they descend from (such as proto-indoeuropean) may once have sounded. While many indoeuropean languages are mutually unintelligible today, they share certain fundamental elements that are best explained by them having been present from the start. It's not an exact science, of course.