John Hawks has the details on the rumors that have been swirling for a while (and now confirmed by a conference talk) about sequencing of autosomal Neandertal DNA. The previous work was mtDNA, which is easier since mitochondria are copious throughout the cell. But, this will give us a lot more information to chew on....
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Evolgen has a nice little post up on the problems with mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in regards to using it to infer demographic history. This form of genomic information is useful in that it is relatively copious, being present in the hundreds of mitochondrion to be found within every cell. This is…
Update: Hawks responds.
John Hawks has not commented on this feature in Wired titled Code of the Caveman. But I'm sure he will, and when he does, I will point you to it because what he says on this topic is worth listening to. But, until then, here are a few points.
1) This extraction of ancient…
John Hawks, along with Gene Expression regular Greg Cochran, has published a paper (PDF) on adaptive introgression in human evolution. In case the jargon is too much, we're talking about the caveman gene. Both Greg and John have blogged the paper. Check out what John says about mtDNA:
However,…
Get in the mood for this bit of news, the synthesis of an artificial organism by Craig Venter's research team.
Here's the equivalent of that twitching hand of Frankenstein's monster:
Those are two colonies of Mycoplasma mycoides, their nucleoids containing entirely synthesized DNA. You can tell…
For a second I thought it said Neanderthal Gnomes. Now that would be a story to rival the Hobbits.