I love science. ~jp~ "Technical developments in DNA recovery have slowly transformed the business of recovering ancient genetic material. As a result, in 2010, a team led by Svante Pääbo, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, revealed it had sequenced the entire genome of a Neanderthal based on three specimens at least 38,000 years old from Vindija Cave, Croatia. The work has since provided critical insights into modern humans’ genetic relationships with this ancient hominin species. Since then Pääbo’s researchers have pushed their genome sequencing power even further into the past and last year announced they had sequenced the genome of a girl belonging to a species of humans called the Denisovans – a close relation to the Neanderthals – who lived about 80,000 years ago. The study showed she had brown eyes, hair and skin. But now scientists have taken that sequencing age limit even further – and by a considerable margin. In Nature this week, a team led by Ludovic Orlando of Copenhagen University published a paper in which they reveal the entire genetic sequence of a species of horse that lived around 700,000 years ago – almost 10 times the current limit. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that immediately raises the prospect that scientists might soon create the genomes of creatures that died more than a million years ago, possibly several million years. By that reckoning, Crichton and Spielberg would not seem to be so far out." rawstory/rs/2013/07/08/dna-sequencing-jurassic-park-was-not-so-wide-of-the-mark/
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 22:56:00 +0000
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