Ancient DNA is generally fragmented into pieces only a few hundred nucleotides long (in comparison to a total genome length of 3 billion). To reconstruct longer sequences, a complete series of damaged fragments is needed, with enough overlap to connect them together. So in my opinion, even fairly short segments of around 100kb are far more effort than anyone is likely to put into it.
On the other hand, this reconstruction of the genome from short fragments is exactly the "shotgun" approach that Craig Venter successfully used in the Human Genome Project. With enough computerization, who knows?
To make a long story short, with this group of researchers, the odds are that there already have been some results that haven't yet been reported.
My own guess is that they have cloned the FoxP2 language gene -- a gene that the same lab is responsible for most of the work on. The arguments presented by this group have consistently been critical of the likelihood of contamination if the results are like a modern human gene. This leads me to believe that their results probably show this gene to be non-humanlike, which wouldn't be a surprise, since the gene itself has undergone a recent selected change in humans.
I use both Google Scholar and Web of Science extensively in my research. I find both of them very useful. I have free (to me) access to both, and can use either as much as I need. But here's why I find myself using Google Scholar much more often:
Google is many times faster. I spend very little time waiting for what I want.
Google often links to full text or PDF versions of articles directly, again saving much time and many steps in finding content.
Google indexes citations within all web-accessible content, including chapters from edited volumes and many foreign journals that have been posted by their authors. This stuff is not typically available on WoS.
Did I mention that Google is many times faster? I rarely have finished a WoS search in less than three minutes; Google generally has my results in seconds.
Google often links directly into PubMed and other database services, allowing me to access their tools with a single click.
The fewer citations reported by Google in a citation search make it much faster to find what I need when what I need is one of the most common citations. Google also appears to be much better about not duplicating entries.
Hello, searching by author's first name? A novel concept, I know...
Now, Google is not better at everything. Web of Science clearly has much more complete citation listings for the journals it indexes. If I need a detailed literature review, then I always have to use the most complete index. But Google is much more convenient for most purposes, and it includes citations that WoS lacks. They are both tools, and as a scholar I find them both essential, but neither is essential alone, since academic work goes far beyond databases into judging content, knowing arcane references, and finding things that have not been read for years. I find that Google sometimes dredges up new old things, and that is very useful to me.
So in my opinion, Google Scholar is more than ready for prime time. I have been recommending it to my students for months.
This is more like Clancy researching government agencies' plans and making fiction based on them. Of course, I stopped reading Clancy when he stopped letting a decent editor go through his prose: how many times does something need to be "pure vanilla" or "faster than a Kansas tornado" anyway?!
But in the book the nuclear isotope fingerprint stuff is very important to the plot, since proves that the relatively advanced weapon design was not from the Russians, and that the bomb material came originally from US--via Israeli--sources. In the end, this and other plot developments caused Ryan to supersede the President's orders to nuke an Iranian city, leading ultimately to the President's resignation. With this kind of material, you'd think Clancy could have stuck to Mideast post-Cold War plots instead of making up Japanese, Chinese, and Indian threats.
Agreed, he does refer mainly to chemical and laboratory techniques. But in these areas, universities are major instruments of closing access also. The largest sources of revenue for many universities are the patent portfolios developed for biomedical applications in university laboratories. These patents keep corporations from running away with the game, and keep corporate money flowing into university research. But universities typically allow licensees to develop subsidiary work quite freely--after all, new applications only increase the licensing fees on their old patents.
I think what is going on here is that some researchers get blocked out of research in their preferred areas because of a history of scientific conflicts with others. Science is "share and share alike" until someone is either perceived as a freeloader or publishes critically against powerful interests. The power to limit resource access becomes an informal adjunct to peer review. I think this system is deplorable in many ways, and opening access to all such resources might be preferable.
I don't know what this guy is talking about. You can already do substantial genetic research with freely available tools and data from the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. A major area of granting by both NIH and NSF is the creation of open source or freely available software for genetic research. I would say that bioinformatics is one of the most active areas for free software development today.
I would say that the largest problem in biotech is not that tools are closed access, but that companies can patent biological and genetic information that they discover with their open access, publically developed tools.
I had one of the keyboards, bought for $24.95 in 1984. It was really cool, because it let you rip graphics out of existing games and program them into new games written in a modified version of BASIC. I remember taking the bomber out of Mission X and mixing it up with the biplane from Triple Action. Ripping sounds from the ROM cartridges was also possible, as I think I played around with the "slumbering dragon" noise from Advanced D&D. With another piece of equipment it was possible to hook the system up to a standard cassette player to save programs and load them later.
Whether Neandertals were a different species from other humans is a testable hypothesis, and paleoanthropologists currently differ about the issue. Part of this is because they differ about the definition of species--some scientists would recognize any recognizable morph as a species, regardless of whether they could interbreed with their contemporaries. However, even those who use a definition that gives special importance to interbreeding as a criterion differ, because the only ways to examine interbreeding in fossil species are to (a) demonstrate the fossil form became extinct without issue, or (b) demonstrate the physical differences between the form and its contemporaries to be significantly greater than expected in an interbreeding population. The evidence is currently equivocal:
Neandertals no longer exist, and their distinguishing physical characteristics (projecting midface, occipital bun, small mastoid processes) no longer appear at appreciable frequencies in recent people. However, some Neandertal characteristics (horizontal-oval mandibular foramen, suprainiac fossa, lambdoidal flattening) do occur in the Europeans who directly follow Neandertals, indicating to many scientists that their genes were swamped by immigration from outside Europe, rather than being replaced by it.
Neandertal mtDNA sequences from ancient bones lie as an outgroup to those of recent people. To many scientists this is evidence of their distinctiveness. However, their mtDNA does not differ from that of living people to the extent that chimpanzee subspecies differ from each other, and the evolutionary pattern of mtDNA in living people may reflect recent selection on the molecule rather than the spread of a distinct non-Neandertal people.
Neandertals are different from their contemporaries and distinguishable by many anatomical criteria, interpreted by some scientists as evidence they did not interbreed with their contemporaries. However, the level of differences has not been shown to indicate a great genetic difference (for example greater than that among living human geographic groups), and it is clear that these differences could have arisen even without any isolation of Pleistocene Europe.
So for these reasons, the debate about Neandertal relationships continues.
Slashdot Mirror
Ancient DNA is generally fragmented into pieces only a few hundred nucleotides long (in comparison to a total genome length of 3 billion). To reconstruct longer sequences, a complete series of damaged fragments is needed, with enough overlap to connect them together. So in my opinion, even fairly short segments of around 100kb are far more effort than anyone is likely to put into it.
On the other hand, this reconstruction of the genome from short fragments is exactly the "shotgun" approach that Craig Venter successfully used in the Human Genome Project. With enough computerization, who knows?
--John (John Hawks Anthropology Weblog)I have a post on this topic on my anthro weblog.
To make a long story short, with this group of researchers, the odds are that there already have been some results that haven't yet been reported.
My own guess is that they have cloned the FoxP2 language gene -- a gene that the same lab is responsible for most of the work on. The arguments presented by this group have consistently been critical of the likelihood of contamination if the results are like a modern human gene. This leads me to believe that their results probably show this gene to be non-humanlike, which wouldn't be a surprise, since the gene itself has undergone a recent selected change in humans.
Anyway, check out the link for more info.
I use both Google Scholar and Web of Science extensively in my research. I find both of them very useful. I have free (to me) access to both, and can use either as much as I need. But here's why I find myself using Google Scholar much more often:
Now, Google is not better at everything. Web of Science clearly has much more complete citation listings for the journals it indexes. If I need a detailed literature review, then I always have to use the most complete index. But Google is much more convenient for most purposes, and it includes citations that WoS lacks. They are both tools, and as a scholar I find them both essential, but neither is essential alone, since academic work goes far beyond databases into judging content, knowing arcane references, and finding things that have not been read for years. I find that Google sometimes dredges up new old things, and that is very useful to me.
So in my opinion, Google Scholar is more than ready for prime time. I have been recommending it to my students for months.
--JH
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/
This is more like Clancy researching government agencies' plans and making fiction based on them. Of course, I stopped reading Clancy when he stopped letting a decent editor go through his prose: how many times does something need to be "pure vanilla" or "faster than a Kansas tornado" anyway?! But in the book the nuclear isotope fingerprint stuff is very important to the plot, since proves that the relatively advanced weapon design was not from the Russians, and that the bomb material came originally from US--via Israeli--sources. In the end, this and other plot developments caused Ryan to supersede the President's orders to nuke an Iranian city, leading ultimately to the President's resignation. With this kind of material, you'd think Clancy could have stuck to Mideast post-Cold War plots instead of making up Japanese, Chinese, and Indian threats.
Agreed, he does refer mainly to chemical and laboratory techniques. But in these areas, universities are major instruments of closing access also. The largest sources of revenue for many universities are the patent portfolios developed for biomedical applications in university laboratories. These patents keep corporations from running away with the game, and keep corporate money flowing into university research. But universities typically allow licensees to develop subsidiary work quite freely--after all, new applications only increase the licensing fees on their old patents.
I think what is going on here is that some researchers get blocked out of research in their preferred areas because of a history of scientific conflicts with others. Science is "share and share alike" until someone is either perceived as a freeloader or publishes critically against powerful interests. The power to limit resource access becomes an informal adjunct to peer review. I think this system is deplorable in many ways, and opening access to all such resources might be preferable.
I don't know what this guy is talking about. You can already do substantial genetic research with freely available tools and data from the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. A major area of granting by both NIH and NSF is the creation of open source or freely available software for genetic research. I would say that bioinformatics is one of the most active areas for free software development today. I would say that the largest problem in biotech is not that tools are closed access, but that companies can patent biological and genetic information that they discover with their open access, publically developed tools.
I had one of the keyboards, bought for $24.95 in 1984. It was really cool, because it let you rip graphics out of existing games and program them into new games written in a modified version of BASIC. I remember taking the bomber out of Mission X and mixing it up with the biplane from Triple Action. Ripping sounds from the ROM cartridges was also possible, as I think I played around with the "slumbering dragon" noise from Advanced D&D. With another piece of equipment it was possible to hook the system up to a standard cassette player to save programs and load them later.
- Neandertals no longer exist, and their distinguishing physical characteristics (projecting midface, occipital bun, small mastoid processes) no longer appear at appreciable frequencies in recent people. However, some Neandertal characteristics (horizontal-oval mandibular foramen, suprainiac fossa, lambdoidal flattening) do occur in the Europeans who directly follow Neandertals, indicating to many scientists that their genes were swamped by immigration from outside Europe, rather than being replaced by it.
- Neandertal mtDNA sequences from ancient bones lie as an outgroup to those of recent people. To many scientists this is evidence of their distinctiveness. However, their mtDNA does not differ from that of living people to the extent that chimpanzee subspecies differ from each other, and the evolutionary pattern of mtDNA in living people may reflect recent selection on the molecule rather than the spread of a distinct non-Neandertal people.
- Neandertals are different from their contemporaries and distinguishable by many anatomical criteria, interpreted by some scientists as evidence they did not interbreed with their contemporaries. However, the level of differences has not been shown to indicate a great genetic difference (for example greater than that among living human geographic groups), and it is clear that these differences could have arisen even without any isolation of Pleistocene Europe.
So for these reasons, the debate about Neandertal relationships continues.