(last one for 2019, I'll take the 30.12. off)
After last week's salmon feature, I am sticking with fishy things. Preparing a future article on evolution, I had to look up my ancient feature pegged to the coelacanth genome and remembered I really liked it. The most mindboggling thought about this, as I noted in a blog entry back in 2013, arises from the fact that the coelacanth is one of the closest relatives of the lineage that conquered land and turned into tetrapods. Thus: "If you look at the tree of life from the perspective of the coelacanth, you'll find that mice, chickens and humans are closer relatives than herring or zebrafish, or anything that lives in an aquarium, and never mind sharks and rays. Try to get that into your brain if you're just a fish." Entirely logical but still mindboggling.
So, anyhow, here is the 2013 feature about coelacanth and other fishes:
What fish genomes can tell us about life on land
We struggled to get good photos of the elusive coelacanth, hence used one of its terrestrial relatives, Homo sapiens instead:
While we humans tend to have grandiose ideas about our special position in the tree of life, more than 70% of our genes have an obvious orthologue in zebrafish, suggesting that the vast majority of our genetic heritage evolved in an aqueous environment. Therefore, research into the genomes of fishes can help to address medical problems. (Photo: iStockphoto 07-15-11 © Vladimir Piskunov.)
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