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Pygmy population near cave where Homo floresiensis fossils were found appears to have evolved short stature independently from the mysterious ancient hominins A fossil skeleton found in a cave on Flores Island, Indonesia, in 2004 turned out to be a previously unknown, very small species of human. Nicknamed the "hobbit" (officially Homo floresiensis), it remains a mysterious species with an unknown relationship to modern humans. Intriguingly, the current inhabitants of Flores include a pygmy population living in a village near the Liang Bua cave where the fossils were found. An international team of scientists has now sequenced and analyzed the...

In the genetic history of our species, the mamas outnumber the papas. A new study in Investigative Genetics reports that females have made a bigger contribution than men. By studying the DNA of 623 males from 51 populations, the researchers found more genetic diversity in the DNA inherited from mothers than they did in the DNA inherited from fathers. At first glance, these results could be taken to mean that there used to be more women than men. But if you know anything about history, it makes more sense to blame reproductive habits: In many cultures, more women reproduced than...

Proposed rankings would classify genomes by completeness and quality.Scientists have proposed classifying genome sequences into six groups, based on their quality.A. Sumner / Science Photo Library Researchers who have mapped a species' genome need to be more explicit about the quality of their sequence, says an international team of genome researchers."People generating these sequences should discriminate a bit more between the products that they provide to the rest of the scientific community," says Patrick Chain of the Joint Genome Institute at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who is first author of a policy paper on genomic standards...

The water flea Daphnia pulex is a commonly used model organism among ecologists and other environmental scientists. Copyright Holder: P.D.N. Hebert, University of Guelph When sexual species reproduce asexually, they accumulate bad mutations at an increased rate, report two Indiana University Bloomington evolutionary biologists in this week's Science. The researchers used the model species Daphnia pulex, or water flea, for their studies. The finding supports a hypothesis that sex is an evolutionary housekeeper that adeptly reorders genes and efficiently removes deleterious gene mutations. The study also suggests sexual reproduction maintains its own existence by punishing, in a sense, individuals of...

Just a year after the first individual human genomes were sequenced, an international team announced today that it will probe the entire genomes of about 1000 people. The aim is to create the most detailed catalog yet of human genetic diversity to help biomedical researchers home in on disease genes. The 1000 Genomes Project will delve much deeper than the three celebrity genomes completed last year, including those of genome researcher J. Craig Venter and DNA co-discoverer James Watson (ScienceNOW, 4 September 2007). It will build on the recently completed HapMap, which describes how blocks of DNA tagged by common...

Source: Massachusetts Institute Of Technology Date: September 11, 2007 New Method Can Reveal Ancestry Of All Genes Across Many Different Genomes Science Daily — The wheels of evolution turn on genetic innovation -- new genes with new functions appear, allowing organisms to grow and adapt in new ways. But deciphering the history of how and when various genes appeared, for any organism, has been a difficult and largely intractable task. A scanning electron micrograph of one of the seventeen fungal species analyzed in the study. (Credit: Image courtesy / Janice Carr, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) Now a team...

THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real. Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”. His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been...

 May 27, 2004 Chimps are not like humans Whole-chromosome comparison reveals much greater genetic differences than expected | By Cathy Holding The vigorous debate on how different chimpanzees are from humans is fuelled by new data in this week's Nature, as the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium reports that 83% of chimpanzee chromosome 22 proteins are different from their human counterparts.The difference is "much more complicated that we initially imagined or speculated," Yoshiyuki Sakaki, who headed the consortium, told The Scientist. "Our group completed the human chromosome 21 sequence about 3 years ago," Sakaki, director of the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center,...