Writing an Abstract: Should be no longer than 250 words and include 1-2 sentences to summarize each section below.
Background:
Give the reader any information needed
to understand the experiment.
Incorporate major scientific concept being
studied.
Experimental Question/Purpose:
Explain what you were doing in this
specific experiment.
Methods:
Explain the approach used to solve the
problem.
Results:
State the major observations made during
your experiment.
Conclusions:
Make inferences to explain the results you
got in your experiment. You may also
include implications and further
investigations.
What’s In An Abstract?
Use the following abstract to identify the different components of the abstract. Choose a different color for each
section and indicate it in the key. Use the correct color to identify each section in the abstract shown below.
Key:
Section
Background
Experimental Question/Purpose
Methods
Results
Conclusions
Color
Science 17 November 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5802, pp. 1113 - 1118
DOI: 10.1126/science.1131412
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Sequencing and Analysis of Neanderthal Genomic DNA
James P. Noonan,1,2 Graham Coop,3 Sridhar Kudaravalli,3 Doug Smith,1 Johannes Krause,4 Joe
Alessi,1Feng Chen,1 Darren Platt,1 Svante Pääbo,4 Jonathan K. Pritchard,3 Edward M. Rubin1,2
Our knowledge of Neanderthals is based on a limited number of remains and artifacts from which we must
make inferences about their biology, behavior, and relationship to ourselves. Here, we describe the
characterization of these extinct hominids from a new perspective, based on the
development of a Neanderthal metagenomic library and its high-throughput sequencing and analysis. Several
lines of evidence indicate that the 65,250 base pairs of hominid sequence so far identified in the library
are of Neanderthal origin, the strongest being the ascertainment of sequence identities
between Neanderthal and chimpanzee at sites where the human genomic sequence is different. These
results enabled us to calculate the human-Neanderthal divergence time based on multiple randomly distributed
autosomal loci. Our analyses suggest that on average the Neanderthal genomic sequence we obtained and the
reference human genome sequence share a most recent common ancestor 706,000 years ago, and that the
humanand Neanderthal ancestral populations split 370,000 years ago, before the emergence of anatomically
modern humans. Our finding that the Neanderthal and human genomes are at least 99.5% identical led us to
develop andsuccessfully implement a targeted method for recovering specific ancient DNA sequences from
metagenomiclibraries. This initial analysis of the Neanderthal genome advances our understanding of the
evolutionary relationshipof Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis and signifies the
dawn of Neanderthal genomics.