Author Topic: Dark centers of chromosomes reveal ancient DNA  (Read 1045 times)

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Dark centers of chromosomes reveal ancient DNA
« on: June 22, 2019, 02:32:16 pm »
Popular Archeology Charles and Sasha Langley 6/19/2019

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – DAVIS—Geneticists exploring the dark heart of the human genome have discovered big chunks of Neanderthal and other ancient DNA. The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.

Centromeres sit in the middle of chromosomes, the pinched-in “waist” in the image of a chromosome from a biology textbook. The centromere anchors the fibers that pull chromosomes apart when cells divide, which means they are really important for understanding what happens when cell division goes wrong, leading to cancer or genetic defects.

But the DNA of centromeres contains lots of repeating sequences, and scientists have been unable to properly map this region.

“It’s the heart of darkness of the genome, we warn students not to go there,” said Charles Langley, professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis. Langley is senior author on a paper describing the work published June 18 in the journal eLife.

Langley and colleagues Sasha Langley and Gary Karpen at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Karen Miga at UC Santa Cruz reasoned that there could be haplotypes—groups of genes that are inherited together in human evolution — that stretch over vast portions of our genomes, and even across the centromere.

More: https://popular-archaeology.com/article/dark-centers-of-chromosomes-reveal-ancient-dna/