Life in evolution’s fast lane
Most living things have a suite of genes dedicated to repairing their DNA, limiting the rate at which their genomes change through time. But recent work by graduate student Jacob L. Steenwyk in the lab of Antonis Rokas, Evolution@Vanderbilt director, and their collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports the discovery of an ancient lineage of budding yeasts that appears to have accumulated a remarkably high load of mutations due to the unprecedented loss of dozens of genes involved in repairing errors in DNA and cell division, previously thought to be essential. The work was published in the journal PLoS Biology.