Nobel Prize in Medicine: Swedish researcher Svante Pabo wins prize for discoveries in paleogenomics

Swedish Svante Pääbo is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Sweden’s Karolinska announced this Monday. According to the company, Pääbo, who He is 67 years oldReceives an important award “For his discoveries about extinct hominids and the genetics of human evolution.”

Award Notification Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine A week of announcements of valuable prizes begins. Find out this Friday Nobel Peace Prize Winners As above, the awarding committee members pointed out “Svante Pääbo founded an entirely new field of science, paleogenomics.”.

They added: “By revealing the genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, Their findings provide a basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human”.

During the explanation made after the announcement, Sweden also Found the extinct human race, Denisova, which he developed from genetic data recovered from a small finger bone specimen. Since 1997, Pääbo has been head of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Pääbo was the first scientist to sequence the Neanderthal genome, an extinct relative of modern humans. In particular, he succeeded in sorting out an area Mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000-year-old bone fragment. Thus, for the first time, we have access to a sequence from an extinct relative. Comparisons with humans and chimpanzees Contemporaries showed that Neanderthals were genetically distinct.

Because analyzes of the small mitochondrial genome provided only limited information, Pääbo took on the challenge of sequencing the Neanderthal genome, the first sequence of which was published in 2010. Comparative analyses It shows that the most recent common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived about 800,000 years ago..

Similarly, these studies show that Neanderthal DNA sequences are more similar to contemporary humans from Europe or Asia than to contemporary humans from Africa.. This means that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred during their millennia of coexistence.. In modern humans of European or Asian descent, approximately 1-4 percent of their genes come from Neanderthals.

Even Babo Discovered Denisova, a previously unknown human species. In 2008, a 40,000-year-old finger bone fragment was discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, Russia. Bone contained exceptionally well-preserved DNAThe research team sorted.

The results showed that DNA sequence is unique Compared to all known sequences from Neanderthals and modern humans. Pääbo discovers a previously unknown human raceThe cave where it was discovered was named Denisova.

Comparisons with sequences of contemporary humans from different parts of the world show that gene flow occurred between Denisova and Homo sapiens. This relationship was observed first In populations in Melanesia and other parts of Southeast AsiaWhere Individuals carry 6 percent Denisovan DNA.

Pääbo’s inventions created A New Understanding of Human Evolutionary History: At the time of migration of ‘Homo sapiens’ In Africa, at least two extinct hominin populations lived in Eurasia.

Neanderthals lived in western Eurasia, while Denisovans lived in the east of the continent. when Expansion of Homo sapiens Out of Africa and their eastward migration, They met and interbred not only with the Neanderthals, but also with the Denisovans.

Equally, Papo showed that genes were transferred from these already extinct hominids to Homo sapiens. After migrating from Africa about 70,000 years ago. This ancient gene flow in modern humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections.

Pääbo’s research led to an entirely new field of science: paleogenomics. Following the initial findings, his team completed the analysis of several additional genome sequences from extinct hominins.