“One goal of the E.B.P. is to compare and contrast large numbers of genomes, revealing how they are related. Benedict Paten, a computational biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed software to align genomes and determine which genes correspond to one another. “It’s a really rich and difficult problem,” he told me, “because genomes evolve by a bunch of really complicated processes.”
The Race to Save the World’s DNA
