Nature conserves its most vital DNA by multitasking, researchers show

Authors of a new report describe and define ‘ultraconserved’ as 50 base pairs long DNA elements found in all 12 Drosophila species they studied — a comparison that is greater than the evolutionary distance between humans and reptiles. Most importantly, the authors show that UCEs are the ‘multitaskers’ of the genome, involved in numerous biological processes simultaneously, and this multi-layered function may be responsible for the extreme DNA sequence conservation observed.