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He pioneered paleogenomics to study human evolution
On the evening of October 3rd, Beijing time, the Caroline Academy of Medicine in Sweden announced that the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will be awarded to Svante Pääbo in recognition of his “Discovery of the Genome and Human Evolution of Extinct Homo Species”. He will receive a bonus of 10 million Swedish kronor (about 6.42 million yuan).
Professor Swante Pabo was born on April 20, 1955. He is the Director of the Center for Evolutionary Anthropology at the Mark Planck Institute in Germany. He has devoted his life to exploring modern and ancient humans. , The relationship between different groups of people in ancient times.
Through a series of groundbreaking research, Professor Pabo has solved many mysteries in the history of human evolution. He was the first scientist to extract DNA from an extinct human and successfully sequence it; discovered a new species of Denisovans; gave birth to a new discipline of “paleogenomics”…
He uses molecular biology to analyze the gene sequence, constantly deduces the origin, evolution and migration of human beings, and raises the upper limit of human beings’ cognition again and again.
Professor Swante Pabo
Who is Swante Pabo?
Pääbo was born into an intellectual family in Sweden to Karin Pääbo, a chemist exiled from Estonia to Sweden, and father to the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982. Prize winner, Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström.
Growing up in such a family, Pabo was interested in biochemistry from an early age. As a child, Pabo loved archaeology, and his room was filled with shards of pottery made by prehistoric Swedes. When he and his mother went on vacation to Egypt when he was 13 years old, he first came into contact with mummies and had the idea of studying mummies.
In 1975, Pabo studied History of Science, Egyptian Archaeology, Russian and more at the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University. Influenced by his father, Pabo turned to medicine two years later, pursuing a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, but not giving up Egyptology.
During his Ph.D., Pabo was exposed to DNA cloning technology. He had always wondered if DNA could be obtained from archaeological remains. But at the time, scientists didn’t know that DNA could survive intact for a hundred years, let alone thousands of years of archaeological site research.
With the help of a former Egyptology professor, Pabo obtained tissue samples from German museums and tried to isolate DNA from them. In 1984, Pabo successfully extracted DNA from a mummy that had been dead for more than 2,000 years, and analyzed a small piece of it. The results were published in the academic journal Antiquity sponsored by the East German Academy of Sciences, and it was featured on the cover of the following year. The story was published in the journal Nature.
In 1990, Pabo became a professor of general biology at the University of Munich, focusing on the study of ancient DNA and its application to the Neanderthals, a close relative of the ancestors of modern Europeans body.
This research, once called a “seemingly impossible mission,” leaves only trace amounts of DNA left in the remains thousands of years later, and what remains will also be destroyed by bacteria and contemporary humans. DNA contamination. Fortunately, the mitochondrial genome is small, with thousands of copies, and Pabo managed to sequence mtDNA from a Neanderthal upper arm bone from a 40,000-year-old bone.
DNA is located in two distinct regions within the cell
This is the first time humans have obtained a genetic sequence from an extinct relative, and the results, published in the journal Cell in 1997, have been described as a watershed moment in evolutionary genetics.
Since then, Pabo has been working on Neanderthals. The first Neanderthal genome sequence was published in 2010, and it was found that Neanderthals may have intermarryed with the ancestors of populations spread across Eurasia. In 2014, Pabo and his colleagues sequenced the entire genome of a Neanderthal from the Denisovan Cave with an accuracy comparable to that of present-day human genomes.
Founder of Paleogenomics
Won numerous awards
Svante Pabo’s groundbreaking research has given birth to a new discipline called “paleogenomics”, according to the official website of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden The genetic differences between ancient humans, for exploring “Where do we come from and our relationship with our ancestors? YesWhat makes Homo sapiens different from other humans? ” and other issues.
Furthermore, in 2008, Swante Pabo’s team sequenced the DNA of a 40,000-year-old finger bone fragment, and an unknown human species was discovered, named Denisovans.
Comparisons with contemporary human sequences from different parts of the world show that gene flow also occurred between Denisovans and Homo sapiens. This relationship was first seen in populations from Melanesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, where individuals carry up to 6 percent of Denisovan DNA.
Based on Pabo’s findings, ancient genetic sequences from extinct relatives were found to influence the physiology of present-day humans.
For example, the Denisovan version of the EPAS1 gene confers an advantage in high-altitude survival and is common among Tibetans today; Neanderthal genes influence our perception of Immune responses to different types of infections; genetic differences between Homo sapiens and our closest extinct relatives identified…
Pabo’s research provides basis for explaining what makes us uniquely human
In the future, research in related fields will focus on analyzing the functional impact of these differences, which will ultimately explain what makes us uniquely human. Professor Pabo has also contributed valuable methods and techniques to the study of ancient hominins. With a series of pioneering research results, he has received numerous honors from the global scientific community. According to Wikipedia:
In 1992, Pabo received the German Research Center’s highest honor, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize;
In 2007 and 2008, Swante Pabo was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time and 8 Science Heroes of the Year by New Scientist One of them; won the “Golden Plate Award” from the American Achievement Institute in 2008;
In June 2010, the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) awarded him the Theodor Bücher Medal for outstanding achievements in biochemistry and molecular biology;
In 2013, he received the Gruber Prize in Genetics for his pioneering research in evolutionary genetics; in 2018, he received one of the world’s highest endowed research awards, the Körber ( Korber) European Science Prize, 750,000 euros;
2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
List of Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine for the past 5 years
2021: American physiologist David J. Julius and American scientist Ardem Patapoutian for their independent discoveries in the field of temperature and baroreceptor research.
2020: American and British scientists Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, Charles M. Rice awarded for “discovery of the hepatitis C virus.”
2019: William G. Kaelin Jr, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza, three American and British scientists, for their “discovery of how cells sense and adapt to the availability of oxygen” .
2018: American scientist James P. Allision and Japanese scientist Tasuku Honjo for “discovery of cancer therapy that suppresses negative immune regulation”.
2017: Three American scientists, Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young, were awarded “for their discoveries in the molecular mechanisms of biological rhythms.”
Source: Medicine
Organization: Wang Hang
Proofreading: Zang Hengjia
Editor in charge: Wang Hang
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