Slashdot Mirror
Coelacanth Genome Sequenced
damn_registrars writes "The lobe-finned fish described as a 'living fossil' due to its apparent lack of change for hundreds of millions of years (thought to be extinct until the 1930s) has been sequenced by an international team, including scientists from Sweden, Harvard, and MIT. The 3-billion-base-pair genome of the Coelacanth was described yesterday in the journal Nature. This paper is published in an open (non-paywalled) manner on Nature, making the full text available to all. 'We found that the genes overall are evolving significantly slower than in every other fish and land vertebrate that we looked at.'"
They don't really seem to have any convincing external factors to make them evolve. I have not RTFA'd, but most things evolve because they have trouble surviving. There are so few of these things that they are endangered, but they don't have any natural predators because they apparently make anything that eats it sick... check the wikipedia article on them.
It's amazing to think that a species is so well adapted that it's survived numerous extinction events and still looks relatively the same. Three hundred million years ago, this planet would have looked like an alien world!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I get that there may be low selection pressure. Are they claiming that there's also a slower rate of genetic drift? That would be interesting. I just assumed that drift would happen similarly across species, perhaps with some minor variation for body temp, metabolism, habitat (i.e. radiation exposure), etc.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
"...We found that the genes overall are evolving significantly slower than in every other fish and land vertebrate that we looked at.'"..
Which indicates that their environment has hardly changed in many million years...
It can also mean they're fairly robust and can survive in a large range of environments. I think that's more likely considering the other fish sharing the same environment has evolved faster.
That said, it's not like the ocean is dominated by coelecanth, so it doesn't mean they've reached optimality or anything. Just that they're good enough to continue reproducing and surviving.
I always post/repost this under my own flag, and never sail the seas of LULZ with another pseudonym or anon posting.
Never.
I was here before you. I was here before there were "logins".
I will be here - long after you've gone - adding value to conversations and spicing others with provocative and sometimes unpopular opinions.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
You aren't a big noticer either, 'cuz somebody already got your extra O.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Why not just prevent posts from ACs, new accounts, or accounts with negative karma from going up for, I dunno, half an hour on a story?
Or maybe reorder comments so that they're by score and not first posted by default? Maybe don't jump right into it. There's this little website called reddit that does it that way, maybe slashdot should wait and see if that catches on before making the jump. Maybe people really like completely off-topic posts as the first thing they see?
I get the feeling that slashdot is trolling me these days. They're still updating stuff, but not bothering to fix that.
If Coelacanth had a front porch, it'd be stealing our baseballs and yelling at us.
The first time I read it I thought it said Cthulhu genome sequenced, now that would be impressive.
The article was pretty sketchy on details. How do they establish how fast coelecanth genes are changing? It's not like they can break open a package of 300 million year old coelecanths and sequence the ancient genome. You have to compare it to other modern animals.
That said, it's not like the ocean is dominated by coelecanth, so it doesn't mean they've reached optimality or anything. Just that they're good enough to continue reproducing and surviving.
I would say that their genes are stuck in a local maxima where they can't evolve. Any mutation dies off or are so different that they leave the area and become a new species.