Our paper on the modelling of evolution of complex genomes is finally out. This is the culmination of about 5 years of spreadsheets, modelling how genomes could evolve. It suggests a specific path to evolving complex genomes, like ours, from simple ones.
Animals and plants are all eukaryotes – organisms with their DNA in a cell nucleus. Eukaryotes can evolve enormous genomes of billions of bases, which control the growth and development of very complex, multicellular organisms like trees and mushrooms and people. Bacteria and Archaea (lumped together in the rather outdated term ‘prokaryotes’) never form such complex forms, although they show amazing chemical diversity. So how did eukaryotes evolve these amazing capabilities?
We have previously argued that eukaryotic genes are mostly ‘default off’ – they are off unless energy is spent turning them on. By contrast prokaryotic genes are mostly ‘default on’ –