Nuclear insertions of mitochondrial DNA from Denisovans
A paper last week by Robert Bücking and coworkers trawled through the recently-sequenced Indonesian Genome Diversity Project dataset looking for snippets of ...
A paper last week by Robert Bücking and coworkers trawled through the recently-sequenced Indonesian Genome Diversity Project dataset looking for snippets of ...
I was reading through some papers for a post on neutral evolution versus selection in human diversification. That’s a topic I’ve written about several times,...
A new paper by Fiona Stewart and coworkers does a bit of forensic DNA analysis on tools made and used by chimpanzees: “DNA recovery from wild chimpanzee tool...
A neat new paper by Kieren Mitchell and colleagues in Biology Letters has an mtDNA phylogeny for some extinct bears of the Americas. The main conclusion is t...
David Roy Smith asks whether sequencing mitochondrial DNA is still worth a scientific paper: “Opinion: Too Many Mitochondrial Genome Papers”.
Notable paper: Heyer, E., Brandenburg, J.-T., Leonardi, M., Toupance, B., Balaresque, P., Hegay, T., Aldashev, A. and Austerlitz, F. (2015), Patrilineal popu...
Jesse Dabney and colleagues, including Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, report on the assembly of a complete mitocho...
mathbionerd author Melissa Wilson Sayres has put together a nice animated explainer about how mtDNA coalescence happens and why mtDNA is not the complete pic...
I’m running through the new paper from Qiaomei Fu and colleagues Fu:revised:2013 about Upper Paleolithic mtDNA genomes. Probably several readers were wonderi...
This seems a newsworthy story by Ian Sample at the Guardian: “Britain ponders ‘three-person embryos’ to combat genetic diseases”.
I just watched the National Geographic documentary "Sex in the Stone Age" and was surprised by the reference to the discovery of a 2nd Denisovan tooth, one w...
Jerry Coyne uses the occasion of polar bear genetics to give a biology lesson I’ve been trying to teach for 15 years: “A new study of polar bears underlines ...
Razib Khan comments on the current round of Henry Louis Gates ancestry programming: “Finding fake roots”, and “Reification is alright by me! Razib notes that...
Neandertals have strikingly limited genetic variation. They once lived across a range from Spain to Siberia. Yet when we compare sequences across their whole...
Michael Balter last week had a news article in Science reviewing archaeological and genetic research into the origins and relationships of Aleut populations ...
I've got a question about something I wrote in a newsgroup in 1995. Okay, that doesn't sound overly urgent, right? The general subject has come up again fo...
A founder effect is caused by genetic drift in a small number of initial founders of a new population.
Gene Expression this morning is worth some thought, a post about the mtDNA of Andaman Islanders and their connections to mainland Asian populations. “Present...
Earlier this spring, I wrote about a paper by Brenna Henn and colleagues that presented new data on SNP variation in recent African hunter-gatherer populatio...
Bornean and Sumatran orangutans are the most highly divergent subspecies within any of the living species of great apes. The two farther apart even than chim...
I love the first day of the month, because my web stats update at 3:00 am, giving me a more or less random midnight slice of my visitors. Over a longer time,...
Wired has an interview with the authors of a book titled, The Science of Battlestar Galactica. I wasn’t a viewer of the show, so I wasn’t aware that the mito...
I’m going to pass along this paper without much comment, it’s by Jon Seger and colleagues and it came out earlier this year in Genetics Seger:2010:
I’ve written about the study of selection on human mtDNA many times, and discussed the signs that Neandertal mtDNA may have disappeared because of selection.
Marie-France Deguilloux and colleagues Deguilloux:2010 present a short analysis of ancient mtDNA recovered from a Neolithic burial at Prissé-la-Charrière, be...
Re: “Time to revise the mtDNA timescale?”:
Krzysztof Cyran and Marek Kimmel (2010) have presented a revised set of estimates of the human mtDNA most recent common ancestor (MRCA). It’s an interesting...
I keep seeing people, who really ought to know better, saying that the new Neandertal genome results show that the gene flow must have been Neandertal men ma...
I had a great session with my advanced students yesterday running through different evolutionary scenarios for the X-Woman. This and some later posts will fo...
I’m attending a symposium on genetics and genealogy of the African Diaspora this morning. Fatimah Jackson is here giving a very interesting talk about her ge...
I’m always skeptical when pathologists attempt to diagnose the ills of historical figures. Even if there are medical records or abundant attestations of symp...
Regarding frozen penguin mtDNA and mutation rates:
Here’s an example of a really incomprehensible press release:
So what’s the baboon DNA doing in that rare monkey species, anyway?
A new paper by Jukka Palo and colleagues investigates the population history of Finland:
Razib posts some thoughts on how the study of human migration history has gotten more and more complex during the last fifteen years.
François Balloux (2009) has a polemic in the online access area of Heredity presenting references about mtDNA selection, and arguing that the use of this sin...
Dienekes, on a new study of early Neolithic and earlier mtDNA variation in Europe:
Tuesday, I referred to mtDNA and sperm evolution. The topic was covered in some detail in a 2004 review paper by Neil Gemmell and colleagues, entitled, “Moth...
I was reading through an excellent review of the recent literature about mtDNA and selection, from Damian Dowling and colleagues (2008). The review focuses o...
Leave it to me to have readers unwilling to ignore selection in recent populations! Here’s an e-mail:
How powerful has genetic drift been in recent human evolution? That’s the question I raised the other day with reference to the claim that a heart disease ri...
Several news stories have reported on an article by Ugo Perego and colleagues, titled “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration Routes from Beringia Marked by Two ...
Roni Caryn Rabin reports on a study linking blood glucose spikes to age-related memory decline:
According to the Telegraph (UK), Neandertals became extinct because their mitochondria leaked excess heat:
I must have seen a dozen stories today that started this way:
I have an excellent e-mail question about last week’s Neandertal mtDNA paper, which has provoked a lot of commentary.
Is there anything surprising about finding the Cambridge Reference Sequence in Paglicci 23?
Last week when I wrote about the study of African mtDNA variation by Behar and colleagues, I focused on the issue of population size. To me, that must be th...
In the early access online edition of Genetics, there is a new paper by Toomas Kivisild and (many) colleagues, titled "The role of selection in the evolutio...
Note: I wrote this post in 2005. We have learned vastly more about Neandertal genetics since then. These two papers are important to the history of discoveri...