Swazi (center), a female African savanna elephant from which a reference genome was sequenced, at the San Diego ZooSAN DIEGO ZOO GLOBAL
By sequencing the genomes of 14 living and extinct species of elephantids, a consortium of researchers has found that throughout their evolutionary histories, different elephant species frequently interbred. As they describe in PNAS yesterday (February 26), the scientists sequenced the genomes of an extinct woolly mammoth, a Columbian mammoth, a straight-tusked elephant, and an American mastodon, as well as living African forest elephants, African savanna elephants, and Asian elephants.
The research “will be a reference point for understanding how diverse elephants are related to each other and it will be a model for conducting similar studies in other species groups,” says study coauthor Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, a genomicist at the Broad Institute, in a statement.
The researchers reconstructed the evolutionary history of elephants by generating genomes ...
