The BBC has a short article on the first DNA isolated from a Neanderthal's nucleus. (Previous efforts have gotten DNA from their mitochondria, which are small energy-generating organelles.) The results, announced at a meeting, are the fruits of a new method for extracting genetic information from fossils. Theoretically it should be possible to pull together a lot of pieces of Neanderthal DNA into something approaching a genome. We'll have to wait for the big paper for the details, but these early clues suggest it will be worth the wait.
Update: More from John Hawks here.
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A dismaying update: the paper in question contains a significant amount of outright plagiarism, and large chunks of text are taken literally from Butterï¬eld et al. 2006, "Oxidative stress in
Alzheimer's disease brain: New insights from
redox proteomics," European Journal of
Pharmacology 545: 39-50…
During these past couple of weeks, we've been comparing mitochondrial DNA sequences from humans and great apes, in order to see how similar the sequences are.
Last week, I got distracted by finding a copy of a human mitochondrial genome, that somehow got out of a mitochondria, and got stuck right…
Last week, we decided to compare a human mitochondrial DNA sequence with the mitochondrial sequences of our cousins, the apes, and find out how similar these sequences really are.
The answer is: really, really, similar.
And you can see that, in the BLAST graph, below the fold.
A quick glance…
Second lecture notes from my BIO101 class (originally from May 08, 2006). As always, in this post and the others in the series, I need comments - is everything kosher? Any suggestions for improvement?
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BIO 101 - Bora Zivkovic - Lecture 1 - Part 2…
That's great, maybe then we will know for sure if the Neanderthal were absorbed by the homo sapiens or not.