Johannes Krause, Adrian Briggs, Richard E. Green, Svante Pääbo (from left to right)

(Best Syndication News) Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Munich Germany say they have mapped nearly 63 percent of the 3.2 billion base pairs in the Neanderthal genome. An announcement that they have completed their “first draft” of the genome was made at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Using novel methods developed by Professor Svante Pääbo, Director of the Institute’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, the team sequenced more than one billion DNA fragments extracted from three Croatian Neanderthal fossils. They believe that this research will help clarify the evolutionary relationship between humans and the prehistoric Neanderthal.

Using a clean room to prevent human and other DNA contamination, the team designed DNA sequence tags that carry unique identifiers and are attached to the ancient DNA molecules.

The majority of the bones came from the Vindija Cave in Croatia. The Max Planck Institute has collaborated with the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy. In order to verify their results they compared their sequences with several million Neanderthals base pairs from other sites including Spain, the Caucasus and the Neander Valley (where Neanderthal got its name) near Düsseldorf, Germany.

The project has been very overwhelming for Paabo and his team, and they have enlisted researchers from around the world to help.

They will look at many genes of special interest in recent human evolution, such as FOXP2, which is involved in speech and language in modern humans, as well as genes such as the Tau locus and the microcephalin-1, implicated in brain aging and development, respectively.

Paabo and his team expect to publish more of their work later this year. So far their findings suggest that Neanderthals have contributed, at most, a “very small fraction of the variation found in contemporary human populations”.

By Mark Williams
Best Syndication Science Writer