The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Svante Pbo, Ph.D., director, department of genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Speaker bio(s)

Dr. Pääbo's laboratory develops techniques for extracting and analyzing DNA from Pleistocene fossil remains. They recently produced a draft genome sequence from Neanderthals, who lived in western Eurasia until becoming extinct around 30,000 years ago. They found that about 2.5 percent of the genomes of people living outside Africa derive from Neanderthals. Dr. Pääbo's lab has also sequenced the genome of a finger bone from Denisova cave in southern Siberia. They show that it derives from a hitherto unknown group of hominins, which they call Denisovans. Approximately 4.8 percent of the genomes of people now living in Papua New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia derive from Denisovans. Together, these findings suggest a "leaky replacement" scenario of human origins in which anatomically modern humans emerged out of Africa and received some degree of gene flow from archaic human populations in Eurasia that they ultimately replaced.

The Neanderthal and Denisova genomes allow the identification of novel genomic features that appeared in present-day humans since their divergence from a common ancestor with their closest extinct relatives. Dr. Pääbo will describe a preliminary analysis of these features and illustrate how they can be functionally analyzed by the example of FOXP2, a gene involved in language and speech production.

Svante Pääbo earned his Ph.D. in 1986 at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, and the University of California at Berkeley. He was a professor of general biology at University of Munich from 1990 to 1998, and became director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 1997. He is also honorary professor of genetics and evolutionary biology at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and guest professor of comparative genomics at the University of Uppsala.

Dr. Pääbo has received four honorary doctorates and several honors, including H.M. The King's Medal from the Swedish Royal Court in 2012, the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 and Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Gloria Phipps

Phone

(212) 327-8967

Sponsor

Gloria Phipps
(212) 327-8967
phippsg@rockefeller.edu