They first fed it information about a section of the genome called the CFTR locus of a variety of species, including the pig, horse, cat, dog, bat, mouse, rabbit, gorilla, chimpanzee and humans. The program then looked for changes in both individual nucleotides and sequences of DNA that were inserted or deleted. Eventually they arrived at a reconstruction of the CFTR locus of the mother of all placental mammals. By running the program over and over, the team was able to test the accuracy of the DNA reconstruction and determined that it was about 98 percent. Comparisons with genetic information from species not initially used, such as the opossum, confirmed the high rate of accuracy.
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