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Million-year-old DNA sheds light on the genomic history of mammoths
Uppsala universitet, Beräkningsbiologi och bioinformatik.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6582-3452
Swedish Museum Nat Hist, Dept Bioinformat & Genet, Stockholm, Sweden; Stockholm Univ, Dept Zool, Stockholm, Sweden; Univ Copenhagen, Sect Computat & RNA Biol, Dept Biol, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Ctr Palaeogenet, Stockholm, Sweden; Swedish Museum Nat Hist, Dept Bioinformat & Genet, Stockholm, Sweden; Stockholm Univ, Dept Zool, Stockholm, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9701-5940
Francis Crick Inst, London, England.
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2021 (English)In: Nature, ISSN 0028-0836, E-ISSN 1476-4687, Vol. 591, no 7849, p. 265-269Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Temporal genomic data hold great potential for studying evolutionary processes such as speciation. However, sampling across speciation events would, in many cases, require genomic time series that stretch well back into the Early Pleistocene subepoch. Although theoretical models suggest that DNA should survive on this timescale1, the oldest genomic data recovered so far are from a horse specimen dated to 780–560 thousand years ago2. Here we report the recovery of genome-wide data from three mammoth specimens dating to the Early and Middle Pleistocene subepochs, two of which are more than one million years old. We find that two distinct mammoth lineages were present in eastern Siberia during the Early Pleistocene. One of these lineages gave rise to the woolly mammoth and the other represents a previously unrecognized lineage that was ancestral to the first mammoths to colonize North America. Our analyses reveal that the Columbian mammoth of North America traces its ancestry to a Middle Pleistocene hybridization between these two lineages, with roughly equal admixture proportions. Finally, we show that the majority of protein-coding changes associated with cold adaptation in woolly mammoths were already present one million years ago. These findings highlight the potential of deep-time palaeogenomics to expand our understanding of speciation and long-term adaptive evolution.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021. Vol. 591, no 7849, p. 265-269
National Category
Evolutionary Biology
Research subject
SWEDARCTIC 2017, Arctic islands 2017
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:polar:diva-8671DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03224-9ISI: 000618965700001PubMedID: 33597750OAI: oai:DiVA.org:polar-8671DiVA, id: diva2:1548141
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2012-3869Swedish Research Council, 2017-04647Swedish Research Council Formas, 2018-01640Knut and Alice Wallenberg FoundationEU, European Research Council, 852558EU, European Research Council, 310763Wellcome trust, 217223/Z/19/ZNERC - the Natural Environment Research Council, NE/J010480/1Science for Life Laboratory - a national resource center for high-throughput molecular bioscience
Note

These authors contributed equally: Tom van der Valk, Patrícia Pečnerová, David Díez-del-Molino

Available from: 2021-04-26 Created: 2021-04-29Bibliographically approved

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