meehawl

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I For One Welcome Our New Vole Overlords

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The vole, a mouselike rodent, is not only the fastest evolving mammal, but also harbors a number of puzzling genetic traits that challenge current scientific understanding … [voles have] evolved in the last 500,000 to 2 million years. This means voles are evolving 60-100 times faster than the average vertebrate

If these numbers are taken at face value, then an average of 30 microtine speciation events have occurred every million years [vole] mtDNA genomes are evolving more rapidly than any other mammalian lineage we sampled, as gauged by the rate of nucleotide substitution across the entire mtDNA genome as well as at each individual protein-coding gene. Additionally, we compared substitution rates within the cytochrome b gene to seven other rodent genera and found that Microtus mtDNA is evolving fastest. The root cause of accelerated evolution in Microtus remains uncertain.

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