This is about apparently promising developments in the search for and sequencing of Neanderthal nuclear DNA:
Neanderthal DNA yields to genome foray.
Genetic material sequenced from 45,000-year-old male.
NATURE -- Published online: 16 May 2006
Rex Dalton
The first nuclear DNA sequences from a Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) have been reported. The results should provide clues about when certain diseases, or traits such as hair or skin colour, arose. They also have geneticists excited about the idea of sequencing a Neanderthal genome.
Svante Pääbo, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, began his Neanderthal Genome Project about two years ago. He and his team have probed 60 Neanderthal specimens from museums for hints that the DNA might have survived millennia of degradation. The species lived across Europe and western Asia from 300,000 to around 30,000 years ago, with the first specimen found in 1856 near Dusseldorf, Germany.
Two of the specimens showed promise, and on 12 May Pääbo's team reported at the Biology of Genomes meeting at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that they had managed to sequence around a million base pairs of nuclear DNA — around 0.03% of the genome — from one of them. This is a 45,000-year-old male specimen found in Vindija Cave outside Zagreb, Croatia.
Click
HERE for access to the full news article.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
PS I did check the Nature site, but as of a few minutes ago, the actual article was nowhere to be found. With luck, the listing will be updated later today.
