Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2022

Why in news?

• Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology.

About the discovery:

• Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology for the year 2022 for his “discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”.
• Svante Pääbo found that gene transfer had occurred from now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections.

Achievements of Svante Pääbo:

• Paleogenomics:
  • Through his groundbreaking research, Svante Pääbo established an entirely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics.
• Sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal:
  • Neanderthals are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago
• New powerful methods for sequence analysis indicate that archaic hominins may also have mixed with Homo sapiens in Africa.

Significance of his discovery:

• Will help better understand human evolution and migration.
• How archaic genes influence present-day humans:
  • Denisovan version of the gene EPAS1 confers an advantage for survival at high altitudes and is common among present-day Tibetans.
  • Neanderthal genes that affect our immune response to different types of infections.
• Last year’s recipients were David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.

PRACTICE QUESTION

(UPSC- 2019)

The word ‘Denisovan’ is sometimes mentioned in media in reference to

(a) Fossils of a kind of dinosaurs

(b) An early human species

(c) A cave system found in North-East India

(d) A geological period in the history of Indian subcontinent

Answer