A multi-million-year natural experiment: comparative genomics on a massive scale and its implications for human health

Improving the diversity and quality of genome assemblies for non-human mammals has been a long-standing goal of comparative genomics. The last year saw substantial progress towards this goal, including the release of genome alignments for 240 mammals and nearly half the primate order. These resources have increased our ability to identify evolutionarily constrained regions of the genome, and together strongly support the importance of these regions to biomedically relevant trait variation in humans. They also provide new strategies for identifying the genetic basis of changes unique to individual lineages, illustrating the value of evolutionary comparative approaches for understanding human health