David Díez-Del-Molino, Marianne Dehasque, J Camilo Chacón-Duque, Patrícia Pečnerová, Alexei Tikhonov, Albert Protopopov, Valeri Plotnikov, Foteini Kanellidou, Pavel Nikolskiy, Peter Mortensen, Gleb K Danilov, Sergey Vartanyan, M Thomas P Gilbert, Adrian M Lister, Peter D Heintzman, Tom van der Valk, Love Dalén
Ancient genomes provide a tool to investigate the genetic basis of adaptations in extinct organisms. However, the identification of species-specific fixed genetic variants requires the analysis of genomes from multiple individuals. Moreover, the long-term scale of adaptive evolution coupled with the short-term nature of traditional time series data has made it difficult to assess when different adaptations evolved. Here, we analyze 23 woolly mammoth genomes, including one of the oldest known specimens at 700,000 years old, to identify fixed derived non-synonymous mutations unique to the species and to obtain estimates of when these mutations evolved...
May 8, 2023: Current Biology: CB