Astrobiologists studying microbial genomes have found that determining the order of genes in an organism’s DNA could provide insight into how genomes from different organisms are related. The team took a large selection of prokaryotic genomes and developed a method for determining how closely the genomes were related to one another based on the conservation of gene order. In doing so, they showed a strong relationship between two well-known phyla of bacteria.

The paper “Genome-wide gene order distances support clustering the gram-positive bacteria,” was published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. The study was supported in part by the Astrobiology Program through its Exobiology & Evolutionary Biology element and the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI).