Peter Forster (geneticist)

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Peter Forster

Peter Forster (born June 27, 1967 in London ) is a German- British geneticist and researches the origin and genetic history of humans. In addition to archaeogenetics , he deals with the reconstruction and dissemination of original languages as well as forensic genetics.

biography

Forster studied chemistry at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel and the University of Hamburg . At the Heinrich Pette Institute for Virology and Immunology in Hamburg, he specialized in genetics and received his doctorate in 1997 in the field of biology on the subject of dispersal and differentiation of modern homo sapiens analyzed with mitochondrial DNA . After his research at the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster , he was appointed a Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge . Forster has been a fellow at Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge since 1999 , editor of the International Journal of Legal Medicine and director of Roots for Real. Forster has been Head of Research at the Institute for Forensic Genetics, Münster, since 2009. He has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2012 . In January 2016, the Royal Society of Biology named him a Fellow.

Research results

The modern man originated, according to Allan Wilson 200,000 years ago in Africa. Peter Forster also discovered, using modern and fossil DNA , that there was only one successful emigration from Africa that Forster dated 60,000 years ago. He calculated the size of this group of emigrants to be less than 200 people. Their descendants migrated an average of about 200 to 1,000 meters per year and reached Europe and Australia more than 40,000 years ago, America about 20,000 years ago. Due to the very small number of founders and the subsequent isolation on the continents, today's characteristic differences have arisen, which were previously summarized in "human races".

From the geographical DNA samples, Forster discovered that today's language areas on all continents were created primarily through the prehistoric expansion of culturally or militarily dominant men, whose new languages ​​were obviously preferred by the local women and passed on to the children. Thus, today there is a statistical connection between language and the Y chromosomes of today's men, but no such connection with the mtDNA of today's women.

Forster also tested his statistical evolutionary approach to languages, and calculated that the Celtic languages ​​spread in the Bronze Age from 3000 BC, and the Germanic languages ​​in the Iron Age after 600 BC, even as far as Britain. In order to achieve these results, Forster created error-corrected DNA and language databases and, together with his colleagues, the phylogenetic network analysis of mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosomal DNA, and linguistic data, as well as the concept of the mtDNA and Y-chromosomal “clock” to the point of application brought. He also developed DNA ancestry tests, geographic ancestry tests, and kinship assessments for genealogy , family research, and forensic medicine as other practical applications .

Coronavirus research

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At the beginning of April 2020, Peter Forster and his co-authors Dr Lucy Forster (National Health Service), Dr Michael Forster (University of Kiel) and Professor Colin Renfrew (University of Cambridge) published a genome analysis on the early spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in humans [1] . They identified three virus types A, B and C, whereby type A appears as the original type according to a comparison with a bat coronavirus, which began to spread successfully in humans in China between mid-September and early December 2019. They paid special attention to type B, which apparently mutated at an accelerated rate outside Asia, [2] [3] and whose subtype B-614 had rapidly established itself as the dominant virus type worldwide by April 2020. [4]

There was also methodological criticism in two letters to the editor, [5] but Forster and co-authors replied that the critics had misread in relation to the A, B and C mutations and in relation to the phylogenetic network method used. [6]

Fonts

  • Peter Forster: Necessary Brain? In: Nature. 375, 1995, p. 444.
  • The Y Chromosome Consortium: A nomenclature system for the tree of human Y-chromosomal binary haplogroups. In: Genome Res. 12, 2002, pp. 339-348.
  • L. Forster, Peter Forster, S. Lutz-Bonengel, H. Willkomm, B. Brinkmann: Natural radioactivity and human mitochondrial DNA mutations. In: Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2002.
  • Peter Forster: Ice Ages and the mitochondrial DNA chronology of human dispersals: a review. In: Phil Trans R Soc Lond B. 359, 2004, pp. 255-264.
  • Peter Forster, C. Renfrew: Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages. McDonald Institute Press, University of Cambridge, 2006, ISBN 1-902937-33-3 .
  • S. Matsumura, Peter Forster: Generation time and effective population size in Polar Eskimos. In: Proc R Soc B. 275, 2008, pp. 1501-1508.
  • Peter Forster, C. Renfrew: Mother Tongue and Y Chromosomes. In: Science. 333, 2011, pp. 1390-1391.
  • Peter Forster, C. Hohoff, B. Dunkelmann, M. Schuerenkamp, ​​H. Pfeiffer, F. Neuhuber, B. Brinkmann "Elevated germline mutation rate in teenage fathers." In: "Proc Biol Sci" 282, 2015: 2014289.

literature

  • Elisabeth Hamel: The development of the peoples in Europe: research in archeology, linguistics and genetics. Rottenbücher Verlag, Ebersberg 2007.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ authority record of the Library of Congress , accessed November 22, 2013.
  2. ^ Scientific team , Genetic Ancestor website , accessed November 22, 2013.
  3. ↑ Member entry by Peter Forster (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on July 6, 2016.
  4. ↑ Peter Forster: Ice Ages and the mitochondrial DNA chronology of human dispersals: a review. In: Phil Trans R Soc Lond B. 359, 2004, pp. 255-264.
  5. ↑ Peter Forster, C. Renfrew: Mother Tongue and Y Chromosomes. In: Science. 333, 2011, pp. 1390-1391.
  6. ^ Peter Forster, C. Renfrew: Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages. McDonald Institute Press, University of Cambridge, 2006, ISBN 1-902937-33-3 .
personal data
SURNAME Forster, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH London