Russell
Posts: 1082
Joined: April 2005
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| Quote | | (jeannot: ) Now, the abstract you posted (Inai et al.) was actually misealding. They clearly imply (unconsciously?) that the gene copy in rats was the ancestor of the copies in humans and guinea pigs, which was a unwarranted assumption. |
I assume you're referring to this: | Quote | | A comparison of the remaining human exon sequences with the corresponding sequences of the guinea pig nonfunctional GULO gene revealed that the same substitutions from rats to both species occurred at a large number of nucleotide positions. |
I agree. That's either poorly worded or they really did think the rat gene was a reasonable approximation of the ancestral one. This may bear some relationship to the fact it's in an obscure journal.
Anyway, there's a serious point hiding in all of this. The authors may have been so enamored of the idea that a "broken" gene would diverge more rapidly after breaking that they uncritically ignored the obvious possibility that it occurred before that. That it should decay faster to one degree or another seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but what degree that is still needs work.
[And, of course, my criticism of the article should be taken with a grain of salt, as I haven't read it! ]
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Must... not... scratch... mosquito bite.
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