Evolutionary biologists have always used a broad range of modernorganisms to inf

Question

Evolutionary biologists have always used a broad range of modernorganisms to infer the characteristics that ancestral organisms mayhave possessed. Genomic sequences are now available for anincreasing number of species, and scientists studying evolutionaryprocesses can take advantage of this enormous amount of data tobring evolution into the arena of molecular studies. By aligningthe sequences of homologous genes and looking for regions ofsimilarity and where changes have occurred, it is possible to inferthe sequence of the ancestral gene. What term is used todescribe the changes in gene sequence that have occurred? How canwe use what we know about this process to construct a timelineshowing when various sequence changes occurred and when they leadto the modern sequences that we know today?

Explanation / Answer

The RNA world theory, discovered and worked out by Carl Woese, usesthe 16s rRNA to find genetic relationships on the phylogenetictree. The closer and more similar (aka conserved) thesequences are, the more their relatedness stands to be and the morelikely lateral genetic transfer may have played a role in theirdiversion.

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