Dr. David Reich from Harvard Medical School and his colleagues have produced a world map of Denisovan and Neanderthal ancestry in 120 diverse populations. Their analysis proposes that Denisovan admixture into humans occurred about 100 generations after Neanderthal admixture. Dr. Reich and co-authors collected their data by comparing known Neanderthal and Denisovan gene sequences across more than 250 genomes from…
In a new evolutionary proof of the old adage, ‘we are what we eat’, Cornell University scientists have found tantalizing evidence that a vegetarian diet has led to a mutation that — if they stray from a balanced omega-6 to omega-3 diet — may make people more susceptible to inflammation, and by association, increased risk of heart disease and colon…
Research from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey examining difficult to treat cancer tumors through genomic profiling shows that tumors with alterations in a signaling pathway responsible for cell regulation may respond to targeted therapy regardless of where the tumor originated in the body. The findings will be presented as part of a poster presentation by members of the Rutgers…
Now that everyone who wants to sound sophisticated about health care is talking about “personalized medicine”—even the president!—the open question is, what part of medicine is going to get personalized first? Which is to say, what can the intricacies of people’s genomes say about the best way to treat what ails them? The answers may well be in blood. Why…
The domestication of dogs may have inadvertently caused harmful genetic changes, a UCLA-led study suggests. Domesticating dogs from gray wolves more than 15,000 years ago involved artificial selection and inbreeding, but the effects of these processes on dog genomes have been little-studied. UCLA researchers analyzed the complete genome sequences of 19 wolves; 25 wild dogs from 10 different countries; and…
A team of geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen’s University Belfast has sequenced the first genomes from ancient Irish humans, and the information buried within is already answering pivotal questions about the origins of Ireland’s people and their culture. The team sequenced the genome of an early farmer woman, who lived near Belfast some 5,200 years ago,…