Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Nuclear DNA recovered from Neanderthal

John Hawks has a post on a report that Paabo et al. have been able to sequence parts of the Y-chromosome in Neanderthal remains found in a cave in Croatia. I wonder how much of the genome they will be able to amplify. What are the major questions that they might attempt to answer?
-admixture with moderns
-time since divergence (looks like 315,000 years ago, according to their analysis)
-Neanderthal genetic diversity (from the 10 or so individuals that they hope to eventually look at)
-a multitute of polymorphisms that are of interest in humans - what do they look like in Neanderthals? etc...

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