Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the CRG and the CNAG (Barcelona), have managed to recover DNA remains from a female woolly mammoth that died in Siberia 52,000 years ago. The novelty is that, for the first time, the remains conserve the three-dimensional structure in the form of chromosomes, which makes it possible to investigate the genes that were active. According to one of the authors of the study, the results of which are published in the journal Cell, this type of discovery "changes the rules of the game, because knowing the shape of the chromosomes of an organism allows us to assemble the entire DNA sequence of extinct creatures and obtain information that was not possible before".

The Karolinska Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo, a specialist in evolutionary genetics, for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution.

Compared to Neanderthals and apes, modern humans experience fewer chromosomal inheritance errors when their brains develop, according to a new study published in Science Advances.