Mushroom-munching poplar-popping Neandertals
Neandertals ate mushrooms. That’s the conclusion of new work examining the DNA remnants in ancient dental calculus. Can we believe it?
All posts tagged with metagenomics
Link: Tracing Hannibal’s invasion using microbes
I know the Hannibal meadow muffin story has done the rounds this week, but I find the approach very interesting: Tracing a historical invasion by looking for...
Notable: Tuberculosis strains in seventeenth-century Hungary
Notable paper: Kay, G. L. et al. (2015) Eighteenth-century genomes show that mixed infections were common at time of peak tuberculosis in Europe. Nat. Commun...
Taking a blender to the skin
A new paper by Alban Mathieu and colleagues looked at the functional pathways represented by the metagenomes of microbial communities living on the skin of t...
Population gut metagenomics
The new research by Tanya Yatsunenko and colleagues examining gut microbiomes in different human populations is just incredibly cool work Yatsunenko:2012. I ...
Scanning the ape fecome
Donald McNeil, Jr., has written up some background detail about last week’s story that falciparum malaria came from gorillas: “A finding on malaria comes fro...
NEANDERTALS LIVE!
I, for one, welcome my Neandertal ancestry.
Microbial extinction
Scientific American asks: “What happens when the microbes that keep us healthy disappear?”
The Neandertal genome FAQ, February 2009 edition
I was out of town last week when the Max-Planck Institute made its announcement about the completion of 1x coverage of the Neandertal genome. It was an excit...
Headlines…
“Necklaces reveal early man’s intelligence”– Norman Hammond of the Times (UK) reports on possible Acheulean drilled fossil sponges.
Mailbag: Resurrect extinct species?
In today’s mail, this question:
Complete Neandertal mitochondrial sequence, and selection on human (not Neandertal) mtDNA
In the current Cell, the Max-Planck group, in coordination with 454 Life Sciences, report the sequence of a complete Neandertal mtDNA. I’m out of town right ...
Neandertal, other ancient DNA review
Last week, a short article in Science by Rachel Mackelprang and Edward Rubin discussed some of the recent advances in ancient DNA extraction. Of most interes...
Probing for the alien within
Laura MacConaill and Matthew Meyerson present a cool short review in Nature Genetics of metagenomics applications in pathogen discovery.
Poincaré pusillanimy
So Science named the Poincaré conjecture proof as the "breakthrough of the year." I got my year-end Discover a couple of weeks ago, and they said thi...
How your metagenome makes you fat
This week's Nature is largely about the association of gut biota with body mass in humans, with two papers and a commentary on the subject. Both papers are ...
Neandertal genome FAQ
With the release of the initial two papers describing chromosomal DNA sequences from a Neandertal, I thought I would put together some frequently asked ques...
DOE genomics
Linked on Evolgen, I found this post from Nobel Intent that gives a quick summary of reasons the U.S. Department of Energy is in the genomics business. It's...
Quote of the day
Metagenomics maven Eddy Rubin, on grinding up some more Neandertals, in Wired:
Human Genome Project afterglow
I was reading The Scientist because RPM sent me to this article, titled "The Human Genome Project +5".
Mozart and mammoth metagenomic manipulation
OK, I just think the Mozart skull DNA extraction is creepy. Not because identifying dead skulls is creepy in itself -- hey, I like forensic anthropology a l...
Cave bear genomics
A new article on the epub area of Science, by James Noonan (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) describes the recovery of nuclear DNA sequences from cave...