Swede Svante Pääbo was distinguished this Monday with the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his studies of human evolution, which included the first sequencing of the genomes of extinct humans and genetic transformations between subspecies, as well as the creation of a new discipline: paleobiology.
Their findings have been widely used by the scientific community to improve human understanding and have revealed that ancient genetic sequences of extinct hominins influence the psyche or immune response of modern men, as highlighted by the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm that awards the prize each year.
“Pääbo used current technology and applied its own methods to extract and analyze ancient DNA, when it was impossible to recover DNA 40,000 years ago.Karolinska Association President Nils-Goran Larsson said at a press conference.
By the end of the 1990s, almost the entire human genome had been sequenced, making possible studies of the genetic relationship between humans, but not between current humans, and extinct species, such as Neanderthals, which disappeared about 30,000 years ago. .
Babu (Stockholm, 1955), who received his Ph.D. from Uppsala University in Sweden in 1986 with his work in molecular immunology, was soon interested in the possibility of applying modern genetics to the study of Neanderthal DNA.
Make the impossible possible
While doing his Ph.D. at Berkeley (US) in the group of Allan Wilson, a pioneer in evolutionary biology, he began to develop methods in the field to meet a major challenge: after thousands of years, only small bits of DNA remained, also contaminated by genetic material From bacteria and modern humans.
Having already worked at the University of Munich (Germany), Pääbo decided to analyze DNA from mitochondria, cellular organelles containing their own DNA, present in thousands of copies, which allowed him for the first time to successfully sequence material from 40,000 bones. years of antiguaty.
The next step, developed at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig (Germany), was to sequence the complete genome of a Neanderthal, something he achieved in 2010 and made possible.”What seemed impossible‘, says the Karolinska Institutet.
This achievement made it possible to investigate the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans, revealing, for example, that their DNA was more similar to that of men who originated in Europe and Asia than that of Africa.
Pääbo and his team also discovered a hitherto unknown hominin called Denisovan by sequencing a sample from a small finger bone found in southern Siberia (Russia).
Comparisons with sequences of modern men from different continents showed that there was also gene flow between Denisovans and Homo sapiens, a relationship that has been verified for example in the populations of Melanesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.
“Revealing the genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, their discoveries provide the basis for exploiting what makes us uniquely human.It was stated in the judgment.
Son of the last Nobel Prize in Medicine and winner of the Prince of Asturias
The scientific profession runs in the family of Svante Pääbo, the son of Estonian chemist Karin Pääbo and Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström, who in turn won the Nobel Prize for Medicine forty years ago, shared with other researchers, for his work on prostaglandins.
In addition to the award he receives today, Pääbo holds other important awards such as Gottfried Leibniz from the Association of German Researchers (1992), the Darwin Wallace Medal and the Princess of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Research 2018.
Larson, president of the Karolinska Society, highlighted the importance of Papo’s work. that it “Really cool find“With repercussions in everyday life, because”It lays the foundation for a deeper understanding of the peculiarities of modern humans“And in the future will give”Extensive knowledge of human physiology“.
Faced with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, as this category is exactly called, which might be surprising, Larson considered it a surprise.Good. We want to surprise people with good prizes and this is a great fundamental discovery“.
Winning the Nobel Prize for Sabo will net 10 million Swedish kronor (916,000 euros, $882,000).
Sabo succeeds Americans David Julius and Erdem Patbutian, distinguished in 2021 for their discovery of temperature and touch receptors, in the Medicine Prize.
With the Medicine or Physiology Prize, this year’s Nobel Prize winners’ round opens, which will continue tomorrow with Physics and will continue on consecutive days, in that order, with Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economics.
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