Anthropology.net

Although Svante Pääbo and John Hawks both agree that if even if the entire Neanderthal genome is successfully sequenced, we’re not likely to see these archaic people making a return to this world, as ‘intact cells’ would be needed to create a viable clone; however, sooner or later, someone will doubtless crack this problem, and the Neanderthals, the woolly mammoth, the mighty cave bear and who knows what else, will once more roam freely, though this time round ‘freely’ would not equate to the freedom they once enjoyed in a world unmodified by the civilising influences of humans.

Scientific American have a report updating us on the work of Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, as they attempt to reconstruct that Neanderthal genome,

…(they) examined ground-up Neanderthal bone as well as 43,000-year-old mammoth bone and 42,000-year-old cave bear bone to determine whether the genomes of such ancient creatures could be sequenced. Although researchers, including Pääbo, have been able to extract DNA from such bones, the entire genetic blueprint remains difficult to map due to confusing gaps in the long strand and potential contamination.

But by analyzing the available DNA, Pääbo found that such damage is most likely to occur at certain junctures in the strand near the end of molecules and, further, that such breakages are most likely to be misread as cytosine (C) for thymine (T) or guanine (G) for adenine (A)—the chemical bases that make up DNA. Read the rest of this entry »