- How did Daniel Nathans use restriction enzymes to build the first genetic map of a DNA molecule?
Genomics and Comparative Genomics
The study of complete genomes and their comparison across species.
- Why did many scientists doubt the shotgun approach would work before Venter's team proved it out?
- What new kind of question could biologists ask once they had the complete yeast gene sequence in hand?
- What diseases have since been linked to genes carried on chromosome 22?
- How many protein-coding genes did the completed analysis find, and how did that compare to predictions?
- Why does the human genome having a gene count similar to a roundworm matter?
- Why did the discovery of only about thirty thousand human genes surprise biologists in 2001?
- How does the human gene count compare to that of simpler organisms like the fruit fly and C. elegans?
- What techniques did Svante Pääbo's team use to recover DNA from 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones?
- What percentage of Neanderthal DNA do people of non-African ancestry carry today?
- When and where did modern humans likely interbreed with Neanderthals?
- How was a complete genome sequenced from a finger bone fragment found in Denisova Cave?
- What made the Denisovans genetically distinct from both modern humans and Neanderthals?
- How do traces of Denisovan DNA persist in modern populations like Melanesians and Tibetans today?
- How many lesions does a human genome sustain in a single day?
- What method did Satari's team use to identify bacteria living in discarded chewing gum?
- How did the bacterial communities in gum vary by geography and gum brand?
- Why was sequencing ancient Neanderthal DNA considered essentially impossible before Svante Pääbo's work in the 1990s?
- What did the 2010 draft Neanderthal genome reveal about interbreeding with modern humans?
- How was the Denisovan lineage identified from such minimal skeletal evidence?
- How much Neanderthal DNA persists in people alive today outside Africa?