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J23
lemmy.world

I wonder what they actually did. My naive impression is that they kind of took the intersection of a collection of genomes. But how do you validate the choice of genomes, and show such an organism existed?

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AlchemicalAgentreply
mander.xyz

I'm not sure about this particular paper, but usually you can compare the number of mutations in a common protein and use that to estimate how long ago a common ancestor existed. As an example here is a graph of the number of mutations in mitochondrial DNA for the protein Cytochrome C. The more mutations you accumulate in a genome the larger amount of time since they split from a common ancestor.

Neutral Mutations in Cytochrome C

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