Genetics

Extinct ‘Horned’ Crocodile

An international team of scientists has recovered and analyzed partial mitochondrial genomes from 1,300-1,400-year-old specimens of Voay robustus, a recently extinct species of ‘horned’ crocodile that lived in Madagascar. Their results indicate that this endemic represented the sister lineage to true crocodiles (Crocodylus) and that the ancestor of modern crocodiles …

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Sequence Mitochondrial

Scientists have extracted and sequenced mitochondrial DNA from a partial femur of an ancient dog that lived in Alaska 10,150 years ago. Their results, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrate that the animal belonged to a lineage of dogs that diverged from Siberian dogs around 16,700 …

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Old Mammoth DNA

An international team of scientists has sequenced and analyzed DNA from three mammoth specimens, two of which are more than one million years old. The results show that two distinct mammoth lineages were present in eastern Siberia during the Early Pleistocene; one of these lineages gave rise to the woolly …

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White Faced Capuchin

A team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Canada has sequenced the genome of the white-faced capuchin (Cebus imitator), a medium-sized New World monkey of the family Cebidae. The white-faced capuchin (Cebus imitator) in Panama. Image credit: Charles J. Sharp, Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk / CC BY-SA 4.0. White-faced capuchin …

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Coelacanths Study

The primitive-looking coelacanth has long been regarded as a ‘living fossil,’ with extant specimens looking very similar to fossils dating back to the Cretaceous period. But while the coelacanth’s body may have changed little, its genome tells another story. Latimeria chalumnae off Pumula on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, South Africa, …

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Australian Lungfish

The Australian lungfish (Neoceratodus forsteri), a species of lungfish native to the Mary and Burnett River systems in south-eastern Queensland, has a genome size about 14 times larger than that of humans. The Australian lungfish (Neoceratodus forsteri) at the National Zoo Aquarium in Canberra, Australia. Image credit: Mitch Ames / …

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Dire Wolves Years Ago

Dire wolves (Canis dirus) are considered to be one of the most common and widespread large carnivores in Pleistocene America, yet relatively little is known about their evolution or extinction. Previous analyses, based on morphology alone, had led scientists to believe that these long-extinct canids were closely related to modern …

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Mariana Islanders

In new research, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Australian National University and the University of Guam analyzed ancient DNA from two humans who lived on Guam 2,200 years ago and found that their ancestry is linked to the Philippines. Moreover, they are closely related to ancient …

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Ancient Corn Domestication

The domestication of corn (Zea mays ssp. mays), a global food staple with great economic and cultural importance, began in southwestern Mexico 9,000 years ago and humans dispersed this important grain to South America by at least 7,000 years ago as a partial domesticate. South America served as a secondary …

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Aging of Human Cells

A gene called GATA6 (GATA binding protein 6) regulates aging of human mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs), according to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) age, the transcription factor GATA6 is increasingly produced in the cell to induce aging response; by transcription factor-based cellular reprogramming, …

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