Ancient DNA pioneer Svante Pääbo wins Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Swedish geneticist Svante Pbo was awarded the prize for his work that illuminates both the past and the present.

Pbo pioneered the field of ancient DNA research. He was the first person to sequence and recover bits of ancient DNA from Neanderthals. After refining his methods, his team was able to sequence a complete Neanderthal genome in 2009. His research has given insight into the genetics of modern humans.

Johannes Krause, who did his PhD in Pbo's lab, says the ancient genomes allow us to understand what makes humans. He notes that comparing modern and extinct humans has given scientists new insights into brain development and other diseases. It will take a few more years to figure them out. It will allow us to understand what distinguishes us.

Pbo will be the first to say it isn't just his work. Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London is a Neanderthal specialist. He has built a good team.

Christina Warinner said that Pbo adjusted his approach along the way. You have to ask what it means once you have the sequence. Pbo thought it was a prank when he first heard about it. He was fascinated with ancient Egypt when he was a child. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Sune Bergstrm, who won a prize for his work on prostaglandins and related substances. Pbo was trying to bring the tools of medicine to the past.

Pbo reported in 1985 that he had found small amounts of DNA in mummies. Modern DNA can be introduced to an ancient sample by the smallest piece of human tissue. Pbo wanted to develop techniques to separate ancient and modern molecule from one another.

It was a failure of his PhD work, which was to recover DNA from mummies. He didn't get anything. Someone could have said, "Well, I'm giving up, this is useless." He didn't He continued to go.

The development of polymerase chain reaction technology gave Pbo a boost in his work. He reached out to museums in Germany to ask for Neanderthal bone samples, grinding small amounts into powder and genotyping them.

In 1997 the results were published in Cell and they showed significant amounts of DNA could be recovered from bones 50,000 years old or more. Mitochondrial DNA is more plentiful in cells than the nucleus so it is preserved in larger quantities. The results showed that humans and Neanderthals were two different groups. It was thought that the groups had not interbred, but that was not the case.

Pbo attempted to sequence an entire Neanderthal genome. He and his team were able to successfully sequence more than four billion base pairs within a few years. The Neanderthal genome was published in Science.

Europeans and Asians have between 1% and 4% of their ancestry from Neanderthals. Modern humans interbred with Neanderthals as they moved out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago.

It is not significant if modern humans and Neanderthals do interbreed. We had interbred with the Neanderthals and that our genes are still active. It has medical significance.

In 2008, Pbo and his team recovered a previously unknown ancestral human population, now known as Denisovans, from a finger bone fragment. The genetic results show that the adaptation to living at high altitude found in modern Tibetan populations may be a result of Denisovan ancestors.

In the 25 years since Pbo wrote Neanderthal, ancient DNA has expanded to look at everything from historical cemeteries to plants and animal evolution. "Svante's insights inspired a generation of scientists and established paleogenomics as a rigorous field of research" vante brought together teams of scientists who, thanks to his leadership, tenacity, and rigor, established a field that has allowed unforeseen insights into human evolution, paleontology, ecology, and so many other disciplines.

There aren't many scientists who win the Nobel Prize in medicine. "Who else would you give it to?" He says that Pbo's tools are mostly his scientific offspring. There's no one else who deserves it like he does.

Katerina Harvati of the University of Tbingen believes that the award is a great honor for the field. The importance of our field not only for understanding our past, but also how our past can affect our lives, our biology, and health today, is highlighted in such a globally impactful way.