It's boom times in ancient DNA research
Dr. Beth Shapiro works with fossils, such as this late Pleistocene horse jawbone, to extract and decode ancient DNA. Duane Froese hide caption
Dr. Beth Shapiro works with fossils, such as this late Pleistocene horse jawbone, to extract and decode ancient DNA.
Duane FroeseThe trouble with old DNA is that it breaks down. Things like ultraviolet light and microbes quickly degrade the little helical molecules.
"As soon as an organism dies, the DNA within its cells starts to break down into smaller and smaller and smaller fragments until eventually there's there's nothing left," says Beth Shapiro, Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of California - Santa Cruz.
Recovering very, very old DNA has, until pretty recently, been something of a fantasy. But the field has made huge leaps forward over the last two decades. That has allowed scientists like Beth Shapiro to push the frontier further and further.
"For a long time, we thought, you know, maybe the limit is going to be around 100,000 years [old]. Or, maybe the limit is going to be around 300,000 years. Well, now ... we've been working with a horse fossil in Alaska that's about 800,000 years old," she says.
Beth's career has spanned the heyday of ancient DNA research, beginning in the late 1990s when rapid genetic sequencing technology was in its early days. She talked with Short Wave co-host Aaron Scott about the expanding range of scientific puzzles the young field is tackling — from new insights into our Neanderthal inheritance to deep questions about ecology and evolution.
Want to hear more about paleogenomics and extinct species? Let us know! Email shortwave@npr.org.
This episode was produced by Thomas Lu, edited by Gabriel Spitzer and fact-checked by Anil Oza. Jay Czys was the audio engineer.