About two months ago, I wrote a comprehensive review paper on the state of the Neandertal genome project for one of my classes. I didn’t get a chance to put it up on Anthropology.net before I left for my trip. So to summarize, I reviewed many topics related to the project, one of which the great pains both the Rubin group and the Pääbo group went to ensure that there wasn’t much modern human DNA contaminants and the rate of sequencing errors was avoided by creating libraries with overlapping repeats.
In a early online release, Jeffrey D. Wall and Sung K. Ki of UCSF, write in PLOS Genetics on the, “Inconsistencies in Neanderthal genomic DNA sequences.”
Two recently published papers describe nuclear DNA sequences that were obtained from the same Neanderthal fossil. Our reanalyses of the data from these studies show that they are not consistent with each other and point to serious problems with the data quality in one of the studies, possibly due to modern human DNA contaminants and/or a high rate of sequencing errors.
Keep your eyes out for the final release of this paper. It will be an important one.
1 Comment
September 11, 2007 at 11:40 am
[...] patterns in sequences of the Neandertal genome Jump to Comments Preemptively following this early online release in PLoS, comes this paper published just now in PNAS, “Patterns of damage in genomic DNA sequences [...]