The man who sequenced the first Neanderthal genome, the person who discovered a new type of human, the Denisovans, Svante Pääbo, is the winner of the Nobel prize in Physiology this year.
Let’s start with perhaps the most important one – the 1997 publication on the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA (mDNA). It established the presence of an extinct human, who was unlike the modern human. But in 2010, he sprung another surprise through genome sequencing and showed that there was, indeed, a gene flow from Neanderthal to modern non-African humans.
He’s not done yet! In the same year (2010), he published the mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia, the Denisovans.
References
Krings et al., Cell, 90, 19–30, 1997
Green et al., Science, 328, 710, 2010
Krause et al., Nature, 464, 894, 2010
