The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and 454 Life Sciences Corporation, in Branford, Connecticut, have announced an ambitious plan to complete a first draft of the Neandertal genome within the next two years. Prof Svante Pääbo, Director of the InstituteTMs Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, and Dr. Michael Egholm, Vice-President of Molecular Biology for 454 Life Sciences will jointly direct the project, made possible by financing from the Max Planck Society. 454 Life SciencesTM newly developed sequencing technology has made it possible to extract and sequence nuclear DNA from Neandertal fossils, a hopeless task using traditional techniques. As a trial, the collaborators have already sequenced approximately one million base pairs of nuclear Neandertal DNA from a 38,000-year-old Croatian fossil.

This August marks the 150th anniversary of the discovery of the first Neandertal fossil in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. Ever since that time, paleontologists and anthropologists have been striving to uncover the role of these stockily-built early humans in modern human evolution who lived in Europe and parts of Asia until they disappeared about 30,000 years ago. Pääbo, a pioneer in the field of ancient DNA research, brought the world closer to understanding our relationship to Neandertals when he sequenced Neandertal mitochondrial DNA in 1997. This breakthrough suggested that Neandertals did not make a substantial contribution to the modern human gene pool, even though the Neandertals and modern humans coexisted for thousands of years. Together with 454 Life Sciences, Pääbo is now gearing up to take the next leap in Neandertal research and sequence the entire 3 billion base pairs that made up their genome. They will then compare the Neandertal genome to the already sequenced human and chimpanzee genomes. This will clarify the evolutionary relationship between humans and Neanderta
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Contact: Sandra Jacob
neandertal@eva.mpg.de
49-341-355-0122
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
20-Jul-2006