The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution".
A very special Monday morning for a new Nobel Laureate.
The post-award interview -
Congratulations are pouring in from around the world.
Additional coverage -
Svante Pääbo
- DOB: 20 April 1955
- Born in: Stockholm, Sweden
- Education: PhD, Uppsala University, Sweden, Egyptology and Medicine
- Post-doc: University of California at Berkeley.
- Head of own laboratory at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (1990-).
- In 1997, Pääbo became one of five directors at the newly founded Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he is still active today.
His father Sune Bergström shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two others in 1982.
Summary
Through his groundbreaking research, Svante Pääbo established an entirely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics, the study of genes of ancient humans and hominins.
Pääbo sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal, a very difficult task at that time. He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova. Importantly, Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago.
Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa approx. 300,000 years ago. Neanderthals developed outside Africa and populated Europe and Western Asia from about 400,000 - 30,000 years ago. About 70,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens migrated from Africa to the Middle East and from there to the rest of the world.
As Homo sapiens expanded outside Africa, they encountered and interbred with Neanderthals in western Eurasia and also with Denisovans the eastern parts of the continent, resulting in gene flow. In modern day humans with European or Asian descent, 1-4% of the genome originates from the Neanderthals. In Melanesia and other parts of South East Asia, individuals carry up to 6% Denisova DNA.
www.nobelprize.org/...
These discoveries were made possible by the pioneering work of Svante Pääbo in sequencing the genomes of hominins using DNA fragments recovered from bones tens of thousands of years old.
More Details on Pääbo’s pioneering work
From www.nobelprize.org/...
Early in his career, Svante Pääbo became fascinated by the possibility of utilizing modern genetic methods to study the DNA of Neanderthals. However, he soon realized the extreme technical challenges, because with time DNA becomes chemically modified and degrades into short fragments. After thousands of years, only trace amounts of DNA are left, and what remains is massively contaminated with DNA from bacteria and contemporary humans (Figure 1). As a postdoctoral student with Allan Wilson, a pioneer in the field of evolutionary biology, Pääbo started to develop methods to study DNA from Neanderthals, an endeavor that lasted several decades.
He decided to analyze DNA from Neanderthal mitochondria – organelles in cells that contain their own DNA. The mitochondrial genome is small and contains only a fraction of the genetic information in the cell, but it is present in thousands of copies, increasing the chance of success. With his refined methods, Pääbo managed to sequence a region of mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000-year-old piece of bone.
Pääbo next took on the enormous challenge of sequencing the Neanderthal nuclear genome.
From www.mpg.de/…
After thousands of years, the bones of Neanderthals are so heavily colonized by bacteria and fungi that up to 99.9 percent of the DNA found in them originates from microbes. In addition, the small amounts of remaining Neanderthal DNA are only present in short fragments that have to be assembled like a gigantic puzzle. Many scientists believed that this task could not be solved.
However, Pääbo's team devised new solutions. The researchers worked under "clean room conditions" comparable to those in the chip industry. This enabled them to prevent the inadvertent introduction of their own DNA into the experiments. In addition, they developed more efficient extraction methods that improved the yield of Neanderthal DNA. Complex computer programs that compared the DNA fragments of ancient bones with reference genomes of chimpanzees and humans helped to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome.
Pääbo accomplished the seemingly impossible and published the first Neanderthal genome sequence in 2010.
In 2008, when analyzing a 40,000-year-old fragment from a finger bone, discovered in the Denisova cave in the southern part of Siberia, Pääbo and his team discovered a previously unknown hominin, which was given the name Denisova.
In 2014, the team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology succeeded in deciphering the Neanderthal genome almost completely.
What makes us uniquely human?
From www.nobelprize.org/… -
Homo sapiens is characterized by its unique capacity to create complex cultures, advanced innovations and figurative art, as well as by the ability to cross open water and spread to all parts of our planet. Neanderthals also lived in groups and had big brains (Figure 4). They also utilized tools, but these developed very little during hundreds of thousands of years. The genetic differences between Homo sapiens and our closest extinct relatives were unknown until they were identified through Pääbo’s seminal work. Intense ongoing research focuses on analyzing the functional implications of these differences with the ultimate goal of explaining what makes us uniquely human.
Nobel Prize Week Schedule
- PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE – Monday, 3 October
- PHYSICS – Tuesday, 4 October
- CHEMISTRY – Wednesday, 5 October
- LITERATURE – Thursday, 6 October
- PEACE – Friday, 7 October
- THE SVERIGES RIKSBANK PRIZE IN ECONOMIC SCIENCES IN MEMORY OF ALFRED NOBEL – Monday, 10 October
Epilogue
There is all around praise for the Nobel Prize award to Svante Pääbo, who is well-admired in the scientific community for his pioneering work and for his perseverance. Let’s hear from those of you here you have a deeper understanding of this field and additional insights into Svante Pääbo’s life and career.
References
- Press release: https://bit.ly/3DOA8BU
- Advanced information: https://bit.ly/3xM4xwK
- Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. At Amazon.
- Origins of Us (2011 BBC series). YouTube link.
- First Peoples (2015 PBS series)
P.S. Thanks to Mokurai for providing some of the links.
