This finding, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, has allowed for deciphering the evolutionary history of genome duplications that occurred in the ancestors of vertebrates, a group that includes humans.

"This study has important implications in the evolutionary and molecular field, as it helps us understand the changes in the genome that accompanied the origin of vertebrates and their most unique structures, such as the complex brain, the jaw and the limbs," explains the scientist of the Department of Animal Biology of the UMA Pascual Anaya, who has coordinated the research.

Thus, this study, which took almost a decade, was carried out by an international consortium that includes more than 30 institutions from Spain, United Kingdom, Japan, China, Italy, Norway and the United States, including the University of Tokyo, the Japan research institute RIKEN, the Chinese Academy of Science, and the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, among others.

Ecological link

The myxini are a group of animals that inhabit deep ocean areas. Known for the amount of mucosa they release when they feel threatened, a focus of research of cosmetic companies, and also for their role as an ecological link in the seabed (since they are scavengers and are responsible for eliminating, among other things, the corpses of whales that end up at the bottom of the sea after dying), until now their genome had not been sequenced due to its complexity.