Reversing ecology reveals ancient environments

From hair color to the ancestral line of parasitic bacteria, scientists can glean a lot from genes. But imagine if genes also revealed where you lived or who you spent time with. It turns out they do, if you know where and how to look. Stanford researchers with collaborators at Tel-Aviv University have now laid the foundation for opening such a window to the past using a technique called "reverse ecology." The technique uses genomic data to examine metabolic networks and pulls out proxies for reconstructing bacterial environments millions of years in the past.

"Based on reverse ecology, you can start with an organism-say, a certain bacterial species that you know nothing about ecologically. But by looking at its genome and metabolic network, you can recreate that past environment the organism lived in,"

"And we've done this with hundreds of different species."