Money and Finance
- Human Evolution: The Neanderthal In The Family
Link to article: Human evolution: The Neanderthal in the familyThirty years after the study of ancient DNA began, it promises to upend our view of the past. Before ancient DNA exposed the sexual proclivities of Neanderthals or the ancestry of the...
- Across 1,000 Genomes, Rarities Abound
Every person’s genetic instruction book is a trove of never-before-seen genetic variants, according to an ongoing effort to map human genetic diversity. In recent years, scientists have discovered that humans carry far more rare genetic variants than...
- What’s A Man?
Studies of brain genetics are starting to reveal what makes humans human THE problem with understanding human uniqueness is precisely that it is unique. Though the proper study of mankind may be man, that study will yield little if there is no reference...
- Soon, $1,000 Will Map Your Genes
SAN FRANCISCO—The quest to harness the power of DNA to develop personalized medicine is on the threshold of a major milestone: the $1,000 genome sequencing. Life Technologies Corp., a Carlsbad, Calif., genomics company, plans to introduce Tuesday a...
- Skeletons Open Window To New Species
CRADLE OF HUMANKIND, South Africa – Nine-year-old Matthew Berger dashed after his dog Tau into the high grass one sunny morning, tripped over a log and stumbled onto a major archaeological discovery. Scientists said Thursday that he had found the bones...
Money and Finance
Genome Brings Ancient Girl to Life
Things like this get me excited for all the young people of the world who are interested in science and choose some field related to genomics for their career paths.
In a stunning technical feat, an international team of scientists has sequenced the genome of an archaic Siberian girl 31 times over, using a new method that amplifies single strands of DNA. The sequencing is so complete that researchers have as sharp a picture of this ancient genome as they would of a living person’s, revealing, for example that the girl had brown eyes, hair, and skin. “No one thought we would have an archaic human genome of such quality,” says Matthias Meyer, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “Everyone was shocked by the counts. That includes me.”
That precision allows the team to compare the nuclear genome of this girl, who lived in Siberia’s Denisova Cave more than 50,000 years ago, directly to the genomes of living people, producing a “near-complete” catalog of the small number of genetic changes that make us different from the Denisovans, who were close relatives of Neandertals. “This is the genetic recipe for being a modern human,” says team leader Svante Pääbo, a paleogeneticist at the institute.
Ironically, this high-resolution genome means that the Denisovans, who are represented in the fossil record by only one tiny finger bone and two teeth, are much better known genetically than any other ancient human — including Neandertals, of which there are hundreds of specimens. The team confirms that the Denisovans interbred with the ancestors of some living humans and found that Denisovans had little genetic diversity, suggesting that their small population waned further as populations of modern humans expanded. “Meyer and the consortium have set up the field of ancient DNA to be revolutionized — again,” says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not part of the team. Evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania agrees: “It’s really going to move the field forward.”
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Related links:
Denisova at high coverage
The fused chromosome 2 was in Denisova
- Human Evolution: The Neanderthal In The Family
Link to article: Human evolution: The Neanderthal in the familyThirty years after the study of ancient DNA began, it promises to upend our view of the past. Before ancient DNA exposed the sexual proclivities of Neanderthals or the ancestry of the...
- Across 1,000 Genomes, Rarities Abound
Every person’s genetic instruction book is a trove of never-before-seen genetic variants, according to an ongoing effort to map human genetic diversity. In recent years, scientists have discovered that humans carry far more rare genetic variants than...
- What’s A Man?
Studies of brain genetics are starting to reveal what makes humans human THE problem with understanding human uniqueness is precisely that it is unique. Though the proper study of mankind may be man, that study will yield little if there is no reference...
- Soon, $1,000 Will Map Your Genes
SAN FRANCISCO—The quest to harness the power of DNA to develop personalized medicine is on the threshold of a major milestone: the $1,000 genome sequencing. Life Technologies Corp., a Carlsbad, Calif., genomics company, plans to introduce Tuesday a...
- Skeletons Open Window To New Species
CRADLE OF HUMANKIND, South Africa – Nine-year-old Matthew Berger dashed after his dog Tau into the high grass one sunny morning, tripped over a log and stumbled onto a major archaeological discovery. Scientists said Thursday that he had found the bones...