Next Generation Sequencing

According to CBC, scientists have found 17 living relatives of a centuries-old “iceman” whose remains were discovered in a melting glacier in northern British Columbia, Canada, nine years ago.

Chief Diane Strand of the Champagne and Ashihik First Nations led a project to search for the young man’s living relatives. She said 241 native people from British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska gave DNA samples for testing and the results produced 17 positive matches. All of those 17 people, and potentially their families, have the same common female ancestor as Kwaday himself.
Click here to read the full article.

From The Human Genome Organisation’s abstract on the project:

Nitrogen and carbon content in whole bone and collagen-type residue extracted from both bone and muscle indicated good preservation of proteinaceous macromolecules. Restriction enzyme analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) determined that the British Columbia frozen remains belong to haplogroup A, one of the Native American mtDNA haplogroups. Data obtained by PCR direct sequencing of the mtDNA control region, and by sequencing the clones from overlapping PCR products were duplicated by an independent laboratory. The comparison of the mtDNA sequence with those of North American, South American, Central American, East Siberian, Greenlander and Northeast Asian populations indicates that the remains share a mtDNA type consistent with different groups of Native Americans.

Click here to read the original 2002 abstract on the “iceman”.