Age As A Factor In Inter-tissue Spacing Of Stable Carbon Isotope Values In Juvenile Human Remains From The Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt

Although stable isotope analysis is routinely utilized in bioarchaeology and relies on principles that are well-understood, there are still fundamental issues that have not been thoroughly investigated. This thesis examines the relationship between inter-tissue spacing of carbon stable isotope values (δ13C) and age in juvenile human remains. Analyses of tissues within the same individual reveal disparate isotopic values for a variety of physiological and biological reasons discussed herein. This project examines the distance between the δ13C values in bone collagen, skin, hair, and nail, and examines how these distances vary between different age groups, utilizing data collected from 52 well-preserved human remains from the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt: 28 individuals between the ages of 1 and 4 years, 14 between 5 and 10 years, and 10 between the ages of 11-15 years. The mean carbon isotope values for each tissue were compared across each age group, and used to calculate the differences between each tissue type. Although distances between tissues were found to vary across all age categories, the distances between collagen and hair, collagen and skin, and collagen and nail are all substantially greater in the 11-15 year old category than those in the 1-4 and 5-10 year categories. Possible physiological, developmental and social factors are discussed in an effort to explain this discrepanc

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead