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This Week in Nature: Nov 21, 2013

In this week's Nature, researchers from the University of Denmark report on draft genome sequences for two individuals from south-central Siberia who lived some 24,000 years ago and 17,000 years ago. They found that the individuals from Siberia are genetically similar to modern-day western Eurasians and Native Americans, but not east Asians. The findings give new clues to the ancestry of Native Americans, and the scientists estimate that about 14 percent to 38 percent of Native American ancestry may have originated from ancient Eurasians with the remainder originating from East Asian populations.

GenomeWeb Daily News has more on this study here.

Meanwhile, in Nature Methods, a team from the Karolinska Institute publishes details of a new liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based method for genome-wide discovery of protein-coding loci in higher eukaryotes. Using high-resolution isoelectric focusing at the peptide level and accurate peptide isoelectric point prediction, they examined the six-reading-frame translation of the human and mouse genomes and identified 98 and 52 previously undiscovered protein-coding loci, respectively. The approach also enabled deep proteome coverage, identifying 13,078 human and 10,637 mouse proteins.