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First portrait of mysterious Denisovans drawn from DNA (2019)
- j7ake 6y agoHow does one draw a face from DNA? Like if I took the the Denisovan genome and randomly mutated a small fraction of nucleotides and asked how its face changed, what would be the answer?
- chmod775 6y agoWe know how certain things in DNA of humans alive today map to features, measurements, etc. Finding some bones/skulls also helps a lot. It's probably not that accurate though, like you would be able to tell what Denisovans looked like generally, but not what a Denisovan looked like with any accuracy. For modern human individuals it's pretty limited to 'obvious' traits like eye color, hair color, and skin color. There was some projects that tried to chart beyond that, but the results are just... ok: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/38/10166 https://www.pnas.org/content/114/38/10166 You might be able to pick someone out of a hundred with that (check Fig. 2 for an example).
- ur-whale 6y agoAm I the only one who finds these kind of articles completely unscientific? And published in nature, no less!
- tokai 6y agoIt's not a scientific article. It is a journalistic article about research. Ewen Callaway is a journalist. He is disseminating actual science published in Nature. You are misunderstanding the premise of the text.
- ur-whale 6y agoThe article, whomever wrote it, is published on their web site and thus carries their name and it's reputation. The article is garbage and therefore tarnishes the journal's reputation even if it isn't published in the journal itself.
- tokai 6y agoIt is published in the journal - as news. I don't care if its good or bad, but your opinion is not worth anything if you lack the literacy to understand what kind of text it is.
- kyberias 6y agoThis is a news article, not a scientific article. The actual (one of them) article referenced is this (from Cell): https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cell.2019.08.035 https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cell.2019.08.035