Researchers analyzing the genomes of cultivated cacao trees have traced their origin to a “single domestication event” some 3,600 years ago. The discovery opens a new front in a long-running argument regarding when and where humans started growing the source of chocolate. “This evidence increases our understanding of how humans moved and established in America,” said […]
When Omar Cornejo got his genomic analysis back from 23andMe, he and his wife, fellow population geneticist Joanna Kelley, were both a bit surprised and vindicated. Venezuelan, Cornejo expected to see the alleles, or variations of a gene, from Native American, western European, and North African populations. But he was unaware that his family’s deep history […]
Four researchers at Washington State University recently received grants for their next-generation DNA sequencing projects through the Genomics Core Laboratory at WSU Health Sciences Spokane. Thirty-four investigators applied.
Two Washington State University researchers are part of a new study finding that present-day Native Americans migrated in a single wave from Siberia at least 23,000 years ago.
With help from a Washington State University population geneticist, Danish researchers have concluded that North America and the Arctic were settled in at least three pulses of migration from Siberia. First came the ancestors of today’s Native Americans, then Paleo-Eskimos – the first to settle in the Arctic – followed by the ancestors of today’s […]
An international team including WSU assistant professor Omar E. Cornejo has mapped the genome of a child from the Clovis period, thereby reviving the scientific debate about the colonization of the Americas. Results published in the journal Nature show the child is a direct ancestor of roughly 80 percent of present day Native Americans. “It […]