Fixing America's Founding

DNA analysis of ancient dogs of the Americas: identifying possible founding haplotypes and reconstructing population histories.

As dogs have traveled with humans to every continent, they can potentially serve as an excellent proxy when studying human migration history. Past genetic studies into the origins of Native American dogs have used portions of the hypervariable region (HVR) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to indicate that prior to European contact the dogs of Native Americans originated in Eurasia. In this study, w...

The initial peopling of the Americas: a growing number of founding mitochondrial genomes from Beringia.

Pan-American mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup C1 has been recently subdivided into three branches, two of which (C1b and C1c) are characterized by ages and geographical distributions that are indicative of an early arrival from Beringia with Paleo-Indians. In contrast, the estimated ages of C1d--the third subset of C1--looked too young to fit the above scenario. To define the origin of this...

Founding Editor

Eight Americas: A New Definition for “Americas”?

Sam Singer In their essay in October’s PLoS Medicine, Daniel Reidpath and Kit Yee Chan challenge the widely cited link between HIV-related stigma and the spread of the epidemic [1]. This is an important question, given the heavy emphasis on stigma in policies of the World Health Organization, the Joint United Programme on HIV/AIDS, and other public health institutions, but in making their argum...

From the Founding Editor

ASL is gearing up for change in looks, content as well as its name. About 27 years after it was launched, ASL is undergoing a complete transformation to meet fresh challenges of the new millennium. The journal will have a new look and feel, its advisory committee reconstituted, a more efficient peer review process and an online platform for submission and review of research papers. Very soon, a...