p-ter has an excellent review of a new paper, Localizing Recent Adaptive Evolution in the Human Genome. Imagine if you will a flat pristine stretch of snow covered field which exhibits a perfect 2-dimensional symmetry. Now, note what happens when a few snow blowers criss-cross the field. That's the sort of thing I imagine when attempting to analogize selective sweeps going through human populations over the past few tens of thousands of years. Money shot:
...In general, we find that recent adaptation is strikingly pervasive in the human genome, with as much as 10% of the genome affected by linkage to a selective sweep.
More like this
The world of genomics is changing. It was initially about sequencing the genome a single representative individual from a particular species.
...that is, if you still think that a genome sequence tells all secrets about someone's success in science etc. ;-)
What happens when I mention a paper describing two more Drosophila genomes?
Genome size can be measured in a variety of ways. Classically, the haploid content of a genome was measured in picograms and represented as the C-value.