Our first CPG retreat paper

Today a new paper from CPG was published in BMC Genomics. It is a methods paper, analyzing contamination in ancient animal DNA and providing tools to solve the problem. Some 70 ancient samples, mainly dogs and mammoths, were sequenced. Several of them contained a low background of human contamination, usually <0.03%, but in some cases…

”They call this Christmas where I’m from…”

Yesterday it was snowing in Stockholm. And as the staff at CPG is extremely responsive, snow and late November immediately resulted in Glühwein production in the lunch room (now heavily restricted in how many people are allowed in there, but even so Glühwein was quickly being produced). With this we got the season feeling going,…

PGHP 2020

This is the fourth year we are giving Paleogenomics and Human Prehistory. And the course is steadily growing. The first year we had two (2!) students, the second five, the third eight, and now this year we have eleven. It was a little bit awkward the first year, with only two students, flying in the…

”Everything I know, I learned from dogs.”

Dogs are amazing animals. You meet them everywhere in our society, and they are so different from one another. But that difference is in the morphology, not so much in the genetics. And here is a funny thing, going back a few thousand years, it was the exact opposite. While they looked more alike each…

CPG at Tovetorp

”That is an article that is waiting to be written!” A comment from my co-PI at CPG Love Dalén, and also what became the base for a CPG retreat on the county side. Tovetorp is a research station managed by the Zoological department at Stockholm University and located some 90km south of Stockholm. It is…

Teaching

When writing about teaching, I usually write about our PGHP course, since that is where I spend most of my teaching efforts. But I do lecture at other courses too every now and then. Now I have done a full week of ancient DNA at the basic course in laboratory archaeology at our dept. Archaeology…

Cake and more from NGI Stockholm

SciLifeLab in Solna in Stockholm do a lot of good things. But what I think they do best of all those good things is to sequence DNA. We had Elísabet Einarsdóttir and Mattias Ormestad visiting yesterday, presenting what is going on at their end and what new stuff to expect from them. And they brought…

An opportunity to do a Ph.D. at CPG

Here is a possibility to do a Ph.D., on ancient DNA, and in Stockholm at CPG. Does it get better? A Ph.D. position in archaeometry focusing on ancient DNA has been announced, and the closing-date is the 15th of October. The position is in archaeology, thus the successful applicant needs to have an interest in…

The Late Neolithic people from Pełczyska

Here is a nice piece of work that was published today. Especially Anna Linderholm, Maja Krzewińska, and Gülşah Merve Kılınç (when these three ladies start to work on something together, it always turns out good in the end), but also a few more of us have worked on this back and forth over the latest…

COVID19 and CPG

So, the epidemic hit Sweden, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is causing trouble. And all of us at CPG agreed that we should help out wherever we could when we could, that this would be more important than any of our projects at the moment (in the middle of an epidemic that is, under any other circumstances…

NEOMATRIX, a way to make our research more interesting

In these times, when we are facing a type of challenge we have not had to deal with for a century, good news of all kinds are welcome. And we had a piece of such good news today, our Twinning application NEOMATRIX was granted. The first type of fundings you look for are the kind…

Be a laboratory assistant at CPG

Bones and teeth, to many of them. I want it to be genomic data. Thus someone needs to help me with transferring them from bones to data. And that is why I am announcing a laboratory assistant position at CPG. I’m looking for someone, preferably with experience from aDNA work such as DNA extractions from…