Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Neanderthal Genes
A bone fragment that scientists had initially ignored has begun to yield secrets of the Neanderthal genome, launching a new way to learn about the stocky and muscular relative of modern humans, scientists say.
Genetic material from the bone has let researchers identify more than a million building blocks of Neanderthal DNA so far, and it should be enough to derive most of the creature’s 3.3 billion blocks within the next two years, said researcher Svante Paabo.
“We’re at the dawn of Neanderthal genomics,” said gene expert Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
Such research will “serve as a DNA time machine that will tell us about the biology and aspects of Neanderthals that we could never get” otherwise, Rubin said.
And the Neanderthal data will shed light on what DNA changes helped produce modern humanity by revealing which changes appeared relatively late in human evolution, after the ancestors of Neanderthals and of humans split apart, scientists said.
Two analyses of bone fragmentPaabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues present an initial analysis of Neanderthal DNA in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. Rubin and his collaborators present their own analysis in this week’s issue of Science.
Both are based on DNA extracted from a bone fragment that lay in a Croatian cave for 38,000 years. “It’s rather small and uninteresting and was thrown into a big box of uninformative bones” at a museum in Zagreb, Croatia, Paabo said.
Genetic material from the bone has let researchers identify more than a million building blocks of Neanderthal DNA so far, and it should be enough to derive most of the creature’s 3.3 billion blocks within the next two years, said researcher Svante Paabo.
“We’re at the dawn of Neanderthal genomics,” said gene expert Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
Such research will “serve as a DNA time machine that will tell us about the biology and aspects of Neanderthals that we could never get” otherwise, Rubin said.
And the Neanderthal data will shed light on what DNA changes helped produce modern humanity by revealing which changes appeared relatively late in human evolution, after the ancestors of Neanderthals and of humans split apart, scientists said.
Two analyses of bone fragmentPaabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues present an initial analysis of Neanderthal DNA in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. Rubin and his collaborators present their own analysis in this week’s issue of Science.
Both are based on DNA extracted from a bone fragment that lay in a Croatian cave for 38,000 years. “It’s rather small and uninteresting and was thrown into a big box of uninformative bones” at a museum in Zagreb, Croatia, Paabo said.
Friday, November 10, 2006
Changes
I am trying a new blog hosted by 1and1.com that has more flexibility than blogger. I will probably keep both sites updated for a while until I decide which one I like more.
http://www.thesciencecorner.org
http://www.thesciencecorner.org
