It must be hell, sequencing the Neanderthal
Reading through a page at Nature about metagenomics (probably requires subscription…) I saw this sentence:
“The biggest metagenomic project on Earth might be our Neanderthal genome project,” says Egholm. They are using 454 to sequence the complete genome of a Neanderthal, which Egholm says they hope to release by the end of the year. But 95–98% of the DNA in the Neanderthal sample comes from the environment rather than from a Neanderthal. This means that to get the 1 coverage, or roughly 3 billion base pairs, of the genome, the team must sequence somewhere between 70 billion to 100 billion base pairs of these environmental samples.
Sequencing the Neanderthal must be quite some challenge! Of course, contamination by bacteria should be fairly easy to discover and get rid of compared to contamination by the humans doing the sequences. We are just too closely related to the Neanderthal for that to be a simple task.
Of course, the Neanderthal specimens are handled carefully, but some contamination is unavoidable. How much of a problem it is, I do not know, though. I tried googling for it, but didn’t really find any consistent answers.
I look forward to getting my hands on the Neanderthal sequence, though. I would love running it through our CoalHMM analysis!