How Evolution Works
Published:30 Jan.2023 Source:University of Würzburg
Genetic changes rarely lead to phenotypic evolution because the underlying mutations are largely random and neutral. Thus, a tremendous amount of mutations accumulate over the extreme time scale at which evolutionary processes occur, making the detection of phenotypically important changes extremely difficult. Fukushima and his colleague David D. Pollock of the University of Colorado (USA) have succeeded in developing a method that achieves significantly better results than previously used methods in the search for the genetic basis of phenotypic traits.
“We have developed a novel metric of molecular evolution that can accurately represent the rate of convergent evolution in protein-coding DNA sequences,” says Fukushima, describing the main result of the now-published work. This new method, he says, can reveal which genetic changes are associated with the phenotypes of organisms on an evolutionary time scale of hundreds of millions of years. It thus offers the possibility of expanding our understanding of how changes in DNA lead to phenotypic innovations that give rise to a great diversity of species.