Aristotle envisioned humanity as the pinnacle of a "Great Chain of Being," a parade of organisms that evolved toward a state of undefined perfection. He might be surprised to learn that to understand how humans came to be, science needs to consult the lesser beasts, particularly their DNA, for genomes carry the ultimate fossils, the living records of shared ancestries, written in a simple four-letter alphabet.
"Comparative genome analyses will be immensely important in identifying the protein-encoding elements in the human genome, and in providing insights into genome evolution," says Eric Green, chief of the National Human Genome Research Institute's (NHGRI) Genome Technology Branch at the recent Genome Sequencing and Analysis Conference. Green is also director of the Division of Intramural Research and the National Institutes of Health's Intramural Sequencing Center (NISC). Even more interesting may be the DNA sequences that do not encode protein, yet persist in modern genomes.1 ...
