4 ms·
To do this kind of very broad genomic analysis, you need a set of markers to compare. These markers, or easy identifiable orthologs, need to be present in most/
by virusduck 11y ago
To do this kind of very broad genomic analysis, you need a set of markers to compare. These markers, or easy identifiable orthologs, need to be present in most/all the organisms in the comparison.
Ribosomal RNA is a well studied marker for both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, so it makes sense to use these as markers.
- dekhn 11y agoyes, I'm aware of this (I studied under Noller who worked with Woese on this). To do broad genomic analysis, you don't need any markers at all. markers are effectively pre-genomic sampling technology. You can obtain the rRNA without doing genomic sequencing. That's far cheaper and faster. What you meant by "markers" are really "gene regions", and my point is that if you use 1% of the gene regions it's not genomic. And, further, the set that you want to compare is much larger than the ribosomal RNA. It should include the entire set of highly conserved genes that are common to all organisms, and even include a number of less conserved genes.