GENETIC diseases such as diabetes and Huntington’s disease may be an evolutionary hangover from our primitive ancestors. This surprising discovery might make it possible to study human diseases in fish and insects – unlikely as that seems – as well in the more usual mice.
To discover when disease-related genes emerged in humans, Tomislav Domazet-Loao from the Ruder Boakovic Institute in Zagreb, Croatia, and colleagues compared our genome with that of organisms as diverse as bacteria and primates, which come from different stages in the evolution of living species.
The team found that we have inherited a far greater proportion of disease-related…
