Researchers led by electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a better way to perform the comparative analysis of entire genomes. This approach can be used to study relationships between different species across geological time scales.

This new approach is poised to unlock discoveries regarding how evolution has shaped present-day genomes and also how the tree of life is organized. The new method, named CASTER, is described in a paper published in Science on 23 January 2025.

CASTER is poised to offer biologists a far more scalable approach than state-of-the-art for comparing full genomes. This is especially relevant given the exploding number of sequenced genomes of both living and also extinct species.