Hundreds of thousands of stretches of DNA have remained unchanged in humans and other primates for over 65 million years but not in other mammals, an international team of scientists, including chief scientist at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) G. Umapathy and his lab members Manu Shivakumara and Mihir Trivedi, discovered. Researchers across the world were also part of this latest collaborative global study.
These evolutionary records could play an important role in improving human health as the aim of genetics research is to identify functional DNA sequences, understand genetic causes, understand the role of these elements in complex diseases and improve diagnoses, they say.
