| How to Reconstruct the Neandertal Genome |
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2007-06-28, 15:30:56 I wrote an article the other day about how researchers might be able to resurrect woolly mammoths and other species that died out in the past 100,000 years or so, by recovering their DNA. The article I was originally going to write was more about a recent paper by Svante Paabo and colleagues, who showed which kinds of errors are common in this ancient DNA, from Neanderthals, cave bears, and mammoths. Scientific American had an article about this, which is basically like the article I originally planned to write. (I saw this first on anthropologist John Hawks' blog.) So if you want more details on what it would take to put together a Neanderthal genome, check out this article. Paabo told me that they're about 1% of the way done with the Neanderthal genome—so I guess that's about 30 million base pairs of DNA, since the human genome (which is almost exactly the same) is 3 billion base pairs. That's pretty impressive, since in October of 2006, they reported analysis of just one million base pairs. Paabo said it's going slower than planned, though. When I asked whether they think it will pick up once they iron out the kinks, he said, "I hope so! Otherwise it's going to take us 99 years to finish it." |