Scientists Plan to Rebuild Neanderthal Genome

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany, plan to reconstruct the genome of Neanderthals, the archaic human species that occupied Europe from 300,000 years ago until 30,000 years ago until being displaced by modern humans. The genome will initially be reconstructed using DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones that are 45,000 years old, which were found in Croatia, though bones from other sites may be analyzed later.

The project is a collaboration between Dr. Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and 454 Life Sciences, a Connecticut company that has developed a new method of sequencing, or decoding, DNA. The sequencing of Neanderthal DNA, long a forlorn hope, suddenly seems possible because of a combination of analytic work on ancient DNA by Dr. Paabo and a new kind of DNA sequencing machine developed by 454 Life Sciences.

Because the genome must be kept in constant repair and starts to break up immediately after the death of the cell, the DNA in Neanderthal bones exists in tiny fragments 100 or so units in length. As it happens, this is just the length that works best with the 454 machine, which is also able to decode vast amounts of DNA at low cost. Read more at nytimes.com …

Purported Baby Cloner Gives Details

For those keeping score of my psychic predictions, my song “I’m growing your clone” predicted clones from DNA in skin cells years ago. This didn’t work… yet… but it will eventually. Wahahahahaha. Whahahahah!

“A maverick fertility expert has revealed hard evidence of a controversial attempt to produce the world’s first cloned human baby.

Panos Zavos, a reproductive scientist, created a storm in 2004 when he called a press conference in London to announce he had cloned a human embryo from the skin cells of an infertile man and transferred it to the uterus of the man’s wife. He later said the transfer had failed and the woman did not become pregnant, but many scientists doubted whether he had performed the experiment at all.

Most cloning and fertility experts say such a move to create a clone baby would be unethical and dangerous for mother and child – few female animals implanted with cloned embryos carry them to term or give birth to healthy offspring. The idea could not be taken seriously, they said, until Dr Zavos, who is based at the University of Kentucky and runs a private fertility clinic in Cyprus, published his results and methods in a scientific journal.

Details have now appeared in this month’s issue of the Archives of Andrology – effectively placing the experiments on the scientific record, albeit in a little-known specialist journal.

In the paper, Dr Zavos and his colleague Karl Illmensee described how they copied the technique used by UK scientists to make Dolly the sheep – known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). They said they took DNA from the man’s skin cells and fused it inside three eggs taken from the woman’s ovaries, which were given a burst of electricity to encourage them to develop as embryos.

After three days, the paper said, one of the embryos had reached the four-cell stage and “was subsequently transferred into the patient’s uterus”. Two weeks later, blood tests showed the 35-year-old woman was not pregnant.” – GuardianUK

“Bigfoot Hand” may be Black Bear Claw

See story and more pictures on Cryptomundo.

Figure 1. Comparison of black bear paw bones (left) with an x-ray of a purported sasquatch hand displayed by Tom Biscardi in 2006. The claws are missing from both images. The x-ray on the right shows that only the metacarpal remains of the first digit. One might conjecture that the proximal phalange of the first digit was intentionally removed from the Biscardi ?hand? to increase the general similarity to a primate hand.
Left image from Bone Clones.