Gene Expression in Archaic Humans Study Lights Path towards Modern Homo sapiens
Neanderthal skull [Halamka/Getty Images]
April 28, 2021
Share
Researchers at Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have devised a new method to harvest more information from the genomes of archaic humans, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, to potentially reveal the physical consequences of genomic differences between us and them. The team published its study (“The
eLife, focused on sequences related to gene expression.
“The Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes enabled the discovery of sequences that differ between modern and archaic humans, the majority of which are noncoding. However, our understanding of the regulatory consequences of these differences remains limited, in part due to the decay of regulatory marks in ancient samples. Here, we used a massively parallel reporter assay in embryonic stem cells, neural progenitor cells, and bone osteoblasts to investigate the regulatory effects of the 14,042 single-nucleotide modern human-specific variants,” write the investigators.