The Speculist

First, the Cave Bear, now Neanderthal Man.

German and U.S. scientists have launched a project to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome, the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said Wednesday.

When the sequencing of the cave bear was announced last month (Only last month! The world is moving fast on this.) it was explained how they were able to extract useful DNA information from old samples once thought to be hopelessly contaminated.

In the past scientists have found it next to impossible to extract useful DNA from such old samples. While some information was thought to remain, broken and scattered, most of the DNA in these old samples was microbial contamination.

So, hoping that there would be enough DNA within these samples to learn something, DOE scientists used a brute force high throughput sequencing approach that was developed for sequencing modern samples. It worked. 6% of the sample was broken pieces of cave bear DNA. That was enough to get a complete sequence. A piece of DNA was found here, a piece there, and then it was reassembled using dog DNA as a template.

Presumably they'll use Homo Sapiens as the template this time.

I love what U.S. geneticist Edward Rubin had to say about the project.

Firstly, we will learn a lot about the Neanderthals. Secondly, we will learn a lot about the uniqueness of human beings. And thirdly, it's simply cool.

Heh. Exactly.