McMaster Ancient DNA News
A female woolly mammoth’s lifetime movements end in an ancient Alaskan hunter-gatherer camp
Tracking the movement of both mammoths and native Alaskans reveals their interactions.
Jan 17, 2024
Permafrost microbial communities follow shifts in vegetation, soils, and megafauna extinctions in Late Pleistocene NW North America
Ancient metagenome communities can be used to track macro-ecological changes
Dec 06, 2023
A 14th century CE Brucella melitensis genome and the recent expansion of the Western Mediterranean clade
A high-quality 14th C. CE Brucella melitensis genome points to a speciation event contemporaneous to sheep domestication.
Aug 01, 2023
Plagued by a cryptic clock: insight and issues from the global phylogeny of Yersinia pestis
Pandemic Y. pestis lineages emerged decades before being historically documented from European sources.
Jan 25, 2023
A runner up to Science's 2022 Breakthrough of the Year
The nomination caps off a productive year for the Poinar lab.
Jan 10, 2023
Evolution of immune genes is associated with the Black Death
Genes that protected our ancestors from Black Death make us more susceptible to autoimmune disorders today
Oct 20, 2022
A 16th century Escherichia coli draft genome associated with an opportunistic bile infection
It is the first ancient genome of Escherichia coli and was also responsible for creating several gallstones.
Jun 16, 2022
Pleistocene mitogenomes reconstructed from the environmental DNA of permafrost sediments
No bones about it: assembling mitochondrial genomes of Pleistocene fauna over 40,000 years from open-air sediments allows for the phylogenetic analysis of multiple megafauna despite the absence of macro-biological tissues.
Jan 10, 2022
Collapse of the mammoth-steppe in central Yukon as revealed by ancient environmental DNA
Ancient environmental DNA reconstructs the Pleistocene-Holocene ecological transition using permafrost sediments from central Yukon and finds evidence for the mid-Holocene survival of horse and woolly mammoth
Dec 08, 2021