By News Editor And Partners
• Dec 22, 2020
New Mexico State University biology Professor Peter Houde is among more than 200 researchers involved in phase two of a massive effort at mapping the genomes of each of the world’s 10,500 bird species. In the project known as B10K, researchers from University of Copenhagen and partner institutions have sequenced 363 genomes from 92.4 percent of all bird families on Earth.
Completion of the first phase of the study in 2014 resulted in the release of dozens of publications in special issues of several premier scientific journals. Initial phase two results were published in the Nov. 12 issue of the journal “Nature.” Each of the four phases work incrementally higher up the family tree of birds to the species level, analyzing how their genomes have evolved from dinosaurs over the last 150 million years.