Ancient DNA (aDNA) approaches have been successfully used to infer the long-term impacts of climate change, domestication, and human exploitation in a range terrestrial species. Nonetheless, studies investigating such using aDNA marine species are rare. Atlantic cod ( Gadus morhua ), is an economically important that has experienced dramatic census population declines during last century. Here,...

Feature T he study of genetic material from ancient specimens was, in its early years, dominated by a race to sequence DNA from extinct species like the dodo and the woolly mammoth. Now that the supply of these crowd-pleasing curiosities has run dry, scientists are starting to ask new questions of ancient DNA (aDNA) that are revealing how the genetic make-up of prehistoric populations changed t...

Previous study of infant burials has suggested that infanticide was routinely practised during the Roman period in Britain. This, together with the observation that there is an adult sex imbalance in favour of males at many Romano-British cemetery sites, has raised the question of female infanticide. We attempted to investigate this possibility by identifying sex in some infant skeletons from R...

An innovative single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) library preparation method has sparked great interest among ancient DNA (aDNA) researchers, especially after reports of endogenous DNA content increases >20-fold in some samples. To investigate the behavior of this method, we generated ssDNA and conventional double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) libraries from 23 ancient and historic plant and animal specimens. W...

3 4 Randal May, Sripathi M. Sureban, Stan A. Lightfoot, Aimee B. Hoskins, Daniel J. Brackett, 5 Russell G. Postier, Rama Ramanujam, Chinthalapally V. Rao, James H. Wyche, Shrikant Anant 6 and Courtney W. Houchen. 7 8 Departments of Medicine, Surgery, Cell Biology and Pathology, University of Oklahoma Health 9 Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73104. 10 OU Cancer Institute, Oklahoma City,...

In the fictional movie “Jurassic Park” dinosaurs were cloned by obtaining the genetic information necessary to make a dinosaur from ancient DNA (aDNA) sequences extracted from dinosaur blood found in the gut of mosquitoes embedded in amber. Although most scientists still consider the science in Jurassic Park fantasy, acquiring dinosaur DNA has become a possibility over the past few years based ...

The analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has proven useful in forensic genetics and ancient DNA (aDNA) studies, where specimens are often highly compromised and DNA quality and quantity are low. In forensic genetics, the mtDNA control region (CR) is commonly sequenced using established Sanger-type Sequencing (STS) protocols involving fragment sizes down to approximately 150 base pairs (bp). Re...

one of the interdisciplinary approaches which recently had a key role in resolving of archaeological issues, especially domestication process, was archaeogenetics. caprines were domesticated in the early neolithic period and their domestication was a major part of the process that led to the invention of agriculture. since goat has had a key role in subsistence economy of human societies in dif...

Recent aDNA analyses demonstrate that the centuries surrounding arrival of Beaker Complex in Britain witnessed a massive turnover genetic make-up island's population. The data provide information both on individuals sampled and ancestral populations from which they derive. Here, authors consider archaeological implications this propose two hypotheses—Beaker Colonisation Steppe Drift—reflecting ...