1/29/2009 PERMALINK
Prof mods term paper plagiarism detector into world's best genome tracer
University of California, Berkeley, researchers have modded methods used to detect plagiarism in books, college papers and computer programs into an improved method for comparing whole genome sequences to construct evolutionary trees, trace disease susceptibility in populations, and even track down people's ancestry. Previous techniques have relied on comparing a limited number of highly conserved genes - no more than a couple dozen. The new method can be used to compare even distantly related organisms or organisms with genomes of vastly different sizes and diversity, and can compare the entire genome, not just a selected small fraction of the gene-containing portion known to code for proteins, which in the human genome is only 1 percent of the DNA. The technique produces groupings of organisms largely consistent with current groupings, but with some interesting discrepancies, according to Sung-Hou Kim, professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley and faculty researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Many of the relative positions of the groups in the family tree - that is, how recently these groups evolved - are quite different from those based on conventional gene alignment methods ... more