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Company, Researchers to Crack Neanderthal DNA Code

Posted on: Thursday, 20 July 2006, 14:25 CDT

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON -- Experts who first managed to tease some DNA out of the bones of a Neanderthal teamed up on Thursday with a gene-sequencing company to try to get a complete Neanderthal genetic code.

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and 454 Life Sciences Corp in Branford, Connecticut, said they would use new technology that amplifies tiny samples of the scarce DNA from bones.

"The advent of 454 Sequencing has enabled us to move forward with a project that was previously thought to be impossible," said Svante Paabo, Director of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute.

Paabo was the first to find DNA in a Neanderthal leg bone, in 1997.

Neanderthals lived in Europe and the Near East until about 30,000 years ago, when Cro-Magnon people, the ancestors of modern humans, moved in.

Researchers have been trying to find out if Neanderthals are also our ancestors, or if they were an evolutionary dead end. Paabo's team was able to get a small amount of DNA from some bones that suggested they did not contribute to the gene pool of living people.

But such old bones do not yield much DNA, the researchers said.

"When an organism dies, its tissues are overrun by bacteria and fungi. Much of the DNA is simply destroyed, and the small amount remaining is broken into short pieces and chemically modified during the long period of fossil formation," the Institute said in a statement.

"This means that when scientists mine tiny samples of ancient bones for DNA, much of the DNA obtained is actually from contaminants such as bacteria, fungi, and even scientists who have previously handled the bones," it added.

"Over the last 20 years, Paabo's research group has developed methods for demonstrating the authenticity of ancient DNA results, as well as technical solutions to the problems of working with short, chemically-modified DNA fragments. Together with 454 Life Sciences they will now combine these methods with a novel high-throughput DNA sequencing that is ideally suited to analyze ancient DNA."

454 Life Sciences Corporation, a majority-owned subsidiary of CuraGen Corporation, said it would use samples from several Neanderthal skeletons, including a 45,000-year-old Croatian bone. They will compare these sequences to those already done on chimpanzees and humans by the publicly funded Human Genome Project.

Source: REUTERS

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