Alex Kaminski’s Blog

Scientists at Penn State are leaders of a team that is the first to report the genome-wide sequence of an extinct animal, according to Webb Miller, professor of biology and of computer science and engineering and one of the project’s two leaders. The scientists sequenced the genome of the woolly mammoth, an extinct species of elephant that was adapted to living in the cold environment of the northern hemisphere. They sequenced four billion DNA bases using next-generation DNA-sequencing instruments and a novel approach that reads ancient DNA highly efficiently. “Previous studies on extinct organisms have generated only small amounts of data,” said Stephan C. Schuster, Penn State professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the project’s other leader. “Our dataset is 100 times more extensive than any other published dataset for an extinct species, demonstrating that ancient DNA studies can be brought up to the same level as modern genome projects.”

Source: e! Science News.

Posted by email from Alex Kaminski’s posterous