Scientists Identify First Known Prehistoric Person With Turner Syndrome
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Turner syndrome is a genetic condition in which a (female) person has only one X chromosome instead of two. Scientists have used a new computational method for precisely measuring sex chromosomes to identify the first prehistoric person with this syndrome dating back some 2,500 years ago, according to a recent paper published in the journal Communications Biology. The team identified four other individuals with sex chromosomes outside the usual XX or XY designations: an early medieval individual with Jacobs syndrome (XYY) and three people from various periods with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY). They also identified an Iron Age infant with Down syndrome.
"It's hard to see a full picture of how these individuals lived and interacted with their society, as they weren't found with possessions or in unusual graves, but it can allow some insight into how perceptions of gender identity have evolved over time," said co-author Kakia Anastasiadou, a graduate student at the Francis Crick Institute.
Added co-author Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, The results of this study open up exciting new possibilities for the study of sex in the past, moving beyond binary categories in a way that would be impossible without the advances being made in ancient DNA analysis."
According to the authors, the emergence of ancient genomics "has revolutionized our ability to examine human biology over thousands of years, providing insight into phenotypic variation, social stratification, and their impact on health throughout history." When it comes to determining sex identification of ancient remains, genomic data can often overcome some of the limitations of traditional osteological analysis, which is less useful if a skeleton is incomplete or for analyzing non-adult remains. There are several publicly available tools for doing ancient DNA analysis, but they are less useful for detecting extra or missing sex chromosomes.
Anastasiadou et al. relied on a large database of ancient DNA collected as part of the Thousand Ancient British Genomes project. Their new computational technique involved determining a predicted baseline number of X and Y chromosomes one would expect to see and comparing that to a careful counting of the exact number of X and Y chromosomes present in the samples. They combined this technique with osteological methods.
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