Anthropology.net

I have a podcast I found thru Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei‘s blog, which actually came originally from Marc Pelletier of Futures in Biotech, that I wanna share withya. The podcast is fairly long, its about 45 minutes long.

Marc interviewed Dr. Svante Pääbo, Director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Dr. Thomas Jarvie, Technical Application Manager at 454 Life Sciences, on ancient DNA and the Neandertal Genome Project. Marc discusses with Drs. Pääbo and Jarvie the limitations and benefits of sequencing ancient DNA, such as its heavy fragmentation, and how 454′s sequencing technology is more logical than enzymatic amplification and other methods, such as bacterial cloning.

If this is a topic that interests you, you maybe interested to hear directly from the scientists in charge about what’s going on with their research.

[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/14453223/view]

UPDATE: I just came across an Ars Technica discussion on evolving tools for ancient DNA, which also discusses the caveats to working with fragments of genomes.