As a starting point, it’s worth noting there’s nothing magical about a genome sequence – it’s merely a very long string of letters representing the sequence of nucleotides in an organism’s DNA.
But for evolutionary biologists, this string of letters is a treasure-trove of information about a species’ evolutionary history. The recent development of efficient and affordable tools to sequence and compare genomes of different species – reflected in the rapidly accumulating data-bank of “comparative genomics” – has allowed scientists to tap into this amazing resource on a scale scarcely imaginable just a few years ago.
