In recent years scientists have been recovered DNA samples from animals and early hominids preserved in Arctic permafrost. Recently, a scientific team recovered the complete genome of a primitive horse or 700,000 years ago when a job with Spanish participation deciphered the genetic information of a hominid 70,000 years old.
But neither science fiction ever imagined that you can recover genetic material from a paleontological located in a temperate climate like the Mediterranean . And that is precisely what it has achieved an international team with Spanish participation from samples of a cave bear specimen 400,000 years ago found in the excavations at Atapuerca (Burgos).
photoCave Bear Jaw. | J. Trueba / MSF
work just published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS) has reconstructed a portion of the genetic material of the parent of the current bear (‘Ursus deningeri’) 16,000 basic units of DNA -nitrogen-bp fragments from no more than 50 units.
“This shows that highly degraded genetic sequences can be assembled to recreate and reconstruct genomes, as in this case the mitochondrial genome of the Cave Bear”, explained to ELMUNDO.es Juan Luis Arsuaga, scientific director of the Museum of Evolution Humana, codirector of the Atapuerca site and one of the authors.
Open the door
primitive human sequences
The researchers obtained DNA samples of this primitive animal in the cortex of a long bone-in more colloquial language, the shaft of the bone- found in the pit of bones of the productive reservoir Burgos, where they found the remains of Homo antecessor, considered the oldest European hominid.
scientific and technical achievement involved in this work is of great importance to students of this species located very early in the evolutionary tree bears. But it is almost impossible not to wonder whether this new method can be used to decode longer DNA sequences that reveal the complete genome of human and animal species for several hundred thousand years.
lead author, researcher Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) Jesse Dabney, has no doubt that is possible. “Of course, the method does not discriminate the nuclear DNA molecules . But the key is how DNA has survived in the sample. Almost always what happens is that there is enough material to redo the puzzle of long genetic sequences “, he told this newspaper.
“This method is currently the best choice for very old samples, such as Homo heidelbergensis, or for samples containing very damaged DNA,” says Dabney. “Of course there are many more challenges in the reconstruction of these ancient human genomes, but the improvement of the extraction method increases the likelihood of success,” he explains.
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