Svante Pääbo

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Svante Pääbo (undated)

Svante Pääbo (born April 20, 1955 in Stockholm ) is a Swedish physician and biologist . He is considered to be the founder of paleogenetics . In 1984 he succeeded in cloning the DNA of a mummy as a doctoral student . The corresponding article in the journal Nature graced the front page in 1985, a very unusual honor for a doctoral student. In his further scientific career he specialized in evolutionary genetics .

Life

Svante Pääbo is the illegitimate son of Nobel Prize winner Sune Bergström and the Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo and grew up in his native Stockholm. Although Sune Bergström was married and had another son, who only found out about Pääbo in 2004, shortly before his father's death, he also devoted himself regularly to his second son.

During his military service he attended an interpreting school for a year. From 1975 he studied Egyptology , Russian, History of Science and from 1977 to 1980, on the advice of his father and medicine at the University of Uppsala , where he met a work in molecular 1986 Immunology his PhD , a doctorate in natural sciences , gained. At the end of his medical studies , however, he was missing the last, clinical section, since he switched to basic research.

Short stays at the Institute for Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich and a cancer research center in London followed within a year . From 1987 to 1990 he was a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley in Allan Wilson's group . In 1990 Pääbo was offered a C4 professorship for general biology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1997 he moved to Leipzig to the newly founded Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology . Since 1999 he has been head of the Evolutionary Genetics department as one of five directors and is also honorary professor at the University of Leipzig .

Pääbo is married to the US primate researcher Linda Vigilant and has two children with her. He describes himself as bisexual .

Scientific achievements

During his PhD in Uppsala, Pääbo was able to use new molecular biological techniques to extract DNA from tissue samples. In doing so, he had the idea to use the same techniques for dead tissue material. With the help of his former professor in Egyptology, he was able to obtain tissue samples from mummies from the Egyptological collection in Uppsala and the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin . In 1984 he succeeded for the first time in isolating genetic material from cells of the mummy preparations. The results published in the same year in the journal Das Altertum of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR , however, received no attention. It was not until the publication in 1985 in the international journal Nature caused a scientific sensation.

After completing his dissertation , Svante Pääbo applied for a postdoc position with Professor Allan Wilson in Berkeley and was accepted in 1987. Wilson's group was the only one at the time that also dealt with the isolation of genetic material from fossil tissue. The next three years at Wilson were very successful as they were able to apply a new method of amplifying DNA, the polymerase chain reaction , to a whole range of extinct animals such as the thylacine , the giant sloth , the cave bear and the mammoth .

At the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Pääbo is mainly concerned with the question of which genetic changes in the history of evolution characterize modern humans. The members of his working group compare genetic material from modern humans with other species of the genus Homo , such as the Neanderthal , as well as with that of other early human species and that of great apes . In 2002 he published, among other things, his research results on the "language gene " FOXP2 , the lack or defects of which result in language inability. In 2010, Pääbo was one of the authors of a study in which it was shown that around 40,000 years ago, in addition to Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, a third population of the genus Homo , called Denisova, lived in the Altai Mountains , independent of these two species . Man . In 2018, he sequenced the genome of the Denisova 11 fossil from the Denisova Cave - a child of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisova father.

A current project deals with the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. A study published in 2010 found that the Neanderthals' genome is significantly more similar to the genome of Europeans and Asians than the genome of Africans. From this it was concluded "that the gene flow from the Neanderthals to the ancestors of the non-Africans took place before the Eurasian groups separated from each other", that is, in the Middle East , where Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans in the period from 110,000 years ago to around 50,000 years coexisted .

As early as 1997, Pääbo's Munich working group, in cooperation with the Rheinisches Landesmuseum and American scientists, compared the mitochondrial DNA of modern Homo sapiens with that of Neanderthals and found no evidence of gene flow. The Rheinisches Landesmuseum had provided a sample from the humerus of a Neanderthal man for this purpose.

As recently as 2004, Pääbo and his team saw no evidence of a significant gene flow from Neanderthals to modern Homo sapiens . This view only changed after the use of new investigation methods with the result that gene flow did indeed take place with a measurable contribution of up to 4% Neanderthal genes to the gene pool of today's Europeans and Asians. Analysis data published between 2013 and 2015 on the Homo sapiens fossils from Peştera cu oasis in Romania and Ust-Ischim in Siberia underpinned these findings, although gene flow has so far only been assumed in one direction (male Homo sapiens to Neanderthals) .

In 2014 Svante Pääbo published the book The Neanderthals and Us: My Search for Primeval Genes .

Awards and memberships

Publications (selection)

literature

  • Ulrich Bahnsen: Early Diversity - Has Homo sapiens displaced an early ancestor or did he mate with her all over the place? Genetic analyzes create new speculations. In: The time . No. 17/2014, April 16, 2014, pp. 35–36
  • Claudia Eberhard-Metzger: Search for the small difference (portrait: Svante Pääbo) . In: Spectrum of Science . No. 11 , 2008, ISSN  0170-2971 , p. 116-122 .

Web links

Commons : Svante Pääbo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ S. Pääbo: Molecular cloning of Ancient Egyptian mummy DNA. In: Nature , 314 (6012), 1985, pp. 644-645, PMID 3990798 , doi: 10.1038 / 314644a0
  2. ↑ Elizabeth Kolbert: Sleeping with the Enemy - What happened between the Neanderthals and us? The New Yorker , August 15, 2011, Link (EN)
  3. ↑ W. Enard et al .: Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene Involved in speech and language. In: Nature. Volume 418, 2002, No. 6900, pp. 869-872. PMID 12192408 full text ( Memento from June 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF)
  4. ↑ Johannes Krause , Qiaomei Fu, Jeffrey M. Good, Bence Viola, Michael V. Shunkov, Anatoli P. Derevianko and Svante Pääbo: The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. In: Nature. Volume 464, 2010, doi: 10.1038 / nature08976
    Sensational find “X-Woman”: Did researchers discover a new species of human being? faz.net, March 24, 2010. Sonja Kastilan: "Filigree finger genes."
  5. ↑ Look, Miss Denisova . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , December 26, 2010, p. 56
  6. ^ Matthew Warren: Mum's a Neanderthal, Dad's a Denisovan: First discovery of an ancient-human hybrid. In: Nature. 560, 2018, p. 417, doi: 10.1038 / d41586-018-06004-0 .
  7. ↑ Richard E. Green et al .: A draft sequence of the Neandertal Genome. In: Science . Volume 328, 2010, pp. 710-722, doi: 10.1126 / science.1188021
  8. ↑ M. Krings et al .: Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans. In: Cell . Volume 90, 1997, pp. 19-30
  9. ↑ No significant contributions by Neanderthals to the gene pool of modern humans . mpg.de, June 22, 2015
  10. ↑ Gene flow from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens. mpg.de, June 28, 2015
  11. ↑ Early Europeans mixed with Neanderthals. On: mpg.de from July 12, 2015, with a picture of the lower jaw Oase1
  12. ↑ Genome of the oldest modern human being decoded. Max Planck Society of October 22, 2014
  13. ↑ Neanderthal genome detected in Homo sapiens, no detection of sapiens genome in Neanderthals yet. On: mpg.de from July 20, 2015
  14. ↑ The Neanderthals and Us: My Search for the Primeval Genes. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014 (original title: Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes , translated by Sebastian Vogel), ISBN 978-3-10-060520-7 .
  15. ^ Member entry by Svante Pääbo at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 22, 2015.
  16. ↑ Nasonline
  17. ^ Universitätsradio Leipzig , October 5th, 2009: Federal Cross of Merit for Svante Pääbo. The director of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Svante Pääbo, was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit with a star.
  18. ^ Evolution researcher Pääbo honored . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , November 25, 2009. Accessed December 10, 2012.
  19. ^ "Hot Potato" - Central German Communication and Media Prize, Prize Winner 2012 . Dump dated December 26, 2015
  20. ↑ http://www.academie-sciences.fr/fr/Liste-des-membres-de-l-Academie-des-sciences-/-P/svante-paabo.html
  21. ↑ Japan Prize 2020
personal data
SURNAME Pääbo, Svante
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish biologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Stockholm