Fumasoni and Murray show how evolution can quickly and reproducibly change conserved features involved in the maintenance of genomes in response to constitutive problems affecting DNA replication.
Four billion years of evolution have produced the remarkable variety of processes that we observe in living organisms. Behind the enormous diversity of cellular structures and functions that natural selection has produced, the processes that perform the foundations of cellular life have kept a remarkably similar architecture. For example, the principles of DNA replication, the process of copying the genome before every cell division, are universally conserved. But when you look closely, the details of DNA replication vary between species: the number and function of factors involved in replication differs dramatically between eukaryotes and eubacteria and shows substantial variability amongst eukaryotes.
