Research report 2013 - Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems
Phenotype and genotype: How repeated evolution can help to detect genomic differences that underlie phenotypic differences between species
Authors
Hiller, Michael
Departments
Biologische Physik / Nachwuchsgruppe Bioinformatik und Evolutionäre Genomik
Summary
Despite availability of many sequenced genomes, we know very little about which genomic changes underlie phenotypic differences between species. Forward Genomics is a new method that uses phenotypes with repeated evolutionary losses to find such associations between genomic and phenotypic differences. For vitamin C synthesis, an example of a repeatedly lost phenotype, the method can correctly pinpoint the vitamin C synthesizing enzyme, just based on a search for genes that evolve neutrally in all non vitamin C synthesizing species.