Reversing Ecology Reveals Ancient Environments

ScienceDaily ^ | February 25, 2009 | Stanford University

[SunkenCiv]

Elhanan Borenstein is lead author of a paper that offers clues to the complex evolutionary interplay between organisms such as parasites and hosts. From hair color to the ancestral line of parasitic bacteria, scientists can glean a lot from genes. But imagine if genes also revealed where you lived or who you spent time with. It turns out they do, if you know where and how to look. Stanford researchers with collaborators at Tel-Aviv University have now laid the foundation for opening such a window to the past using a technique called "reverse ecology." The technique uses genomic data to examine metabolic networks and pulls out proxies for reconstructing bacterial environments millions of years in the past... Researchers have used genomic data to study metabolic networks -- the chemical reactions in metabolism that determine the physiological and biochemical properties of cells... Through the metabolic network, organisms accumulate biochemical compounds from their interactions with the surrounding environment (e.g., oxygen, glutamine or sulfate). These molecules also correlate with other environmental properties like temperature and salinity... Borenstein and colleagues hope to use their data to discern major environmental events of the past, including key events in the history of life on Earth.

[SunkenCiv]

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