Jun 27
Scientists have managed to sequence the genome of a 700,000-year-old horse—in the process generating the oldest complete DNA sequence yet.
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Jan 08
Everyone knows that a drop of blood or strand of hair is all the police need to identify suspect’s DNA. But now scientists from Harvard have gone a step further: they can sequence an entire genome from a single cell. More »
Nov 14
When an outbreak of MRSA was detected in 12 babies at Rosie Hospital in Cambridge, UK, doctors panicked. The superbug is famously difficult to treat and particularly dangerous in infants. The risks were immediate; the implications dire. And how the hospital avoided catastrophe is a scientific sleuth story of the highest order. More »
Sep 02
Max Planck Institute sequences genome of Siberian girl from 80,000 years ago, smashes DNA barriers
Posted in: Today's Chili 
We’ve known little of the genetic sequences of our precursors, despite having found many examples of their remains: the requirement for two strands in traditional DNA sequencing isn’t much help when we’re usually thankful to get just one. The Max Planck Institute has devised a new, single-strand technique that may very well fill in the complete picture. Binding specific molecules to a strand, so enzymes can copy the sequence, has let researchers make at least one pass over 99.9 percent of the genome of a Siberian girl from roughly 80,000 years ago — giving science the most complete genetic picture of any human ancestor to date, all from the one bone you see above. The gene map tells us that the brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl was part of a splinter population known as the Denisovans that sat in between Neanderthals and ourselves, having forked the family tree hundreds of thousands of years before today. It also shows that there’s a small trace of Denisovans and their Neanderthal roots in modern East Asia, which we would never have known just by staring at fossils. Future discoveries could take years to leave an impact, but MPI may have just opened the floodgates of knowledge for our collective history.
Max Planck Institute sequences genome of Siberian girl from 80,000 years ago, smashes DNA barriers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Sep 2012 01:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Aug 18
Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organically-grown storage (video)
Posted in: Today's Chili 
Early research has had DNA making circuits and little factories. We haven’t really seen DNA used as a storage medium, however, and it’s evident we’ve been missing out. A Harvard team led by George Church, Sriram Kosuri and Yuan Gao can stuff 96 bits into a DNA strand by treating each base (A, C, G, T) as though it’s a binary value. The genetic sequence is then synthesized by a microfluidic chip that matches up that sequence with its position in a relevant data set, even when all the DNA strands are out of order. The technique doesn’t sound like much on its own, but the microscopic size amounts to a gigantic amount of information at a scale we can see: about 704TB of data fits into a cubic millimeter, or more than you’d get out of a few hundred hard drives. Caveats? The processing time is currently too slow for time-sensitive content, and cells with living DNA would destroy the strands too quickly to make them viable for anything more than just transfers. All the same, such density and a lifespan of eons could have us turning to DNA storage not just for personal backups, but for backing up humanity’s collective knowledge. We’re less ambitious — we’d most like to know if we’ll be buying organic hard drives alongside the fair trade coffee and locally-sourced fruit.
Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organically-grown storage (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 01:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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