Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Toronto have sequence a virtually - pure genome from a piddling bush moa – a flightless snort autochthonous to New Zealand that went extinct after the island was first settle by humans in the 1200s .
Thedigitized DNA blueprint , distil from a single toe bone , will enhance our agreement of how moas are touch to other fowl , what they were like in life , and how – and potentially why – moas develop their wingless dead body from winged ancestors .
Reaching heights of 50 to 90 centimeters ( 1.6 to 3 foot ) , the forest - dwelling bush moa was sizable by our standards , yet was the littlest of the nine experience specie in the moa house . Back when manlike scientists traveled the globe , collecting specimen and sketch out animal family trees , it was simply assumed that the emu - mould herbivores were link to emus , cassowaries , and other bird lack wings . Thus , these creatures were lump into a group calledratitesand their skeletons were expose together in museums worldwide .
But our assumed grouping werethrown into disarraywhen DNA sequencing technology burst onto the scene . A 2014 subject ( also by co - author Allan Baker ) that examined part of the moa genome showed that the birds were actually more closely related to to tinamous , a family of South American fly birds .
To well understand the newly mysterious moa , we need more transmissible information . And although a good few moa continue exist , it ’s not as dewy-eyed as mash up a bone and separating out the nucleotides . DNA molecules have a521 - year half - life , meaning that more than one-half of the bonds between the base pairs are broken in even the most recently deceased specimens ( about 700 days older ) .
gratefully , incur with child quantities of disconnected DNA is now possible , thanks to high - throughput sequencing ( HTS ) engineering . Other researchers have used HTS to sequence near - thoroughgoing versions of the Neanderthal , Denisovan , andwoolly mammothgenomes .
In the current study , useable onlinebut not yet published in a peer - reviewed diary , the team used HTS to translate 900 million base pairs of DNA in the toe osseous tissue . After reference an emu genome , they were able-bodied to arrange the chaotic AGTC patterns into roughly an 85 percent complete map of the genome .
“ The other 15 percent is in their data but is difficult to organize using the emu genome , ” Ben J. Novak , a de - experimental extinction scientist who help sequence the passenger pigeon genome , said toStat News . “ The fact that they could get a genome from a picayune bush moa toe off-white is a big deal , since now we might be able-bodied to use their data to do other nonextant bird species . ”
After analyzing the little bush moa ’s reconstructed genes , the source found Modern evidence in support of the recent theory that wing loss among ratite bird in reality occurred multiple times severally , rather than the flightless bird all evolving from one flightless antecedent .
Future investigation on ratite evolution will be able to use this valuable genomic information as a resource .
[ H / T : Stat News ]
