Monthly Archives: March 2014

Ancient chicken DNA may shed light on the migratory patterns of early Polynesian people.

According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ancient Polynesian chickens might not have migrated to South America as some scientists believe. Researchers came to their conclusion after comparing mitochondrial DNA taken from chicken bones from archeological sites in several Pacific islands with DNA taken from 122 feathers from modern chickens in the South Pacific.

"We were able to re-examine bones used in previous studies that had linked ancient Pacific and South American chickens, suggesting early human contact, and found that some of the results were contaminated with modern chicken DNA, which occurs at trace levels in many laboratory components," Professor Alan Cooper a professor from the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA said in a statement. "We were able to show that the ancient chicken DNA provided no evidence of any pre-Columbian contact between these areas."

The results showed that the chicken DNA had a distinct genetic marker that is not found in modern South American chickens, which suggests that the Polynesian and South American people did not have much contact.

"Indeed, the lack of the Polynesian sequences [of DNA] in modern South American chickens ... would argue against any trading contact as far as chickens go," Cooper told National Geographic.

By sequencing the ancient DNA, researchers were able to track the early movements and trading patterns in the Pacific.

"We can show [from chicken DNA] that the trail heads back into the Philippines," Cooper said. "We're currently working on tracing it farther northward from there. However, we're following a proxy, rather than the actual humans themselves."

The history behind the settlement of the Pacific Islands remains largely a mystery. Historians have determined the colonizing of the region took place in two phases: the first was more than 3,000 years ago when seafarers from Papua New Guinea sailed to islands like Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, New Caledonia and populated them. The second took place around 800 A.D. when settlers came to the islands such as Tahiti, Bora Bora, the Marquesas, Easter Island, and Hawaii. To this day, exactly why and how these voyages were accomplished has left more questions than answers. Very few artifacts or writings remain.

"There are still many theories about where the early human colonists of the remote Pacific came from, which routes they followed and whether they made contact with the South American mainland, Jeremy Austin, ACAD Deputy Director said in a statement. Domestic animals, such as chickens, carried on these early voyages have left behind a genetic record that can solve some of these long standing mysteries."

One lingering question is whether the Polynesian people made it all the way to South America, and if they beat Christopher Columbus to it. The latest study says suggests this did not happen, but many scientists disagree.

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When Did Chickens Cross The Pacific Ocean? DNA Shows No Evidence Of Pre-Columbian Contact

Following recent progress in DNA sequencing, California-based TeselaGen has developed a prototyping platform to help streamline synthetic biology experiments.

As the costs of DNA sequencing and synthesis plummet, a host of computer science-meets-biotech startups are emerging in Silicon Valley. Among the new players is San Francisco- headquartered TeselaGen, which creates middleware third party software which enables different IT applications to talk to each other for biotech labs looking to speed up the design and iteration of new DNA constructs. The company builds tools that help researchers set up and manage synthetic biology experiments and interpret data from lab equipment. According to TeselaGen CEO Mike Fero, the companys vision in developing a platform for rapid prototyping in synthetic biology is to help laboratories doing analysis to close the design-build-test-and-evolve loop. The company is currently backed by about $1 million in Small Business Innovation Research grants from theNational Science Foundation, an independent US government agency whose mission is to promote science and engineering through research programs and education projects.

The IT platform developed by TeselaGen aims to shorten the time frame it takes to get your DNA built and run more experiments, explains Mike Fero. TeselaGen has built visual tools that help researchers view, edit and manage sequences quickly and easily. The team has also created a design canvas that supports Synthetic Biology Open Language, an open set of standards that help synthetic biologists and genetic engineers share DNA designs. In addition they are leveraging j5, which is a new software-based tool that automates DNA assembly and design, promoting a faster design-build-test-and-evolve process. Like other companies in the field, TeselaGen gives its product away free to academic researchers, but charges corporate clients annual subscription fees.

A biologist might want to test 10,000 different variants of a design, with minor alterations in each. Right now, the cost of synthesizing each and every one of those constructs would be too expensive, and Mike Fero is hoping that that some of the products TeselaGen is building could in the future help to bring the costs of such experiments down considerably. Meanwhile, the advent of automated procedures in the biotechnology domain is reflected in the growth of companies such as scientific outsourcing provider Transcriptic, which runs fully automated labs, and Genome CompilerCorporation, which builds (CAM/CAD) design and manufacturing tools for biologists. Genome Compiler provides similar solutions to the sequence visualization tools that TeselaGen offers researchers, the major differences being that they are not based on Synthetic Biology Open Language and that Genome Complier does not use any equivalent to the j5 protocol. In the same way that large data flows are changing the way we solve problems nowadays, the next generation of synthetic biologists could well be relying solely on programming interfaces to carry out their experiments.

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TeselaGen provides a rapid prototyping platform for DNA synthesis