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Friday 15 February 2013

Breaking News: Bigfoot genome finally published

It's not April 1st yet, however something a little bit weird has been reported on several web sites.
Let's start from the beginning: back in November 2012 a team of researchers (experts in genetics, forensics, imaging, and pathology led by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum) claimed that through a DNA study they were able to sequence three complete Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch) nuclear genomes and determined that the species is a human hybrid. The scientists said that Bigfoot is a human relative that arose roughly 15,000 years ago and is a hybrid of modern Homo sapiens and an unknown primate species.
A few days ago a paper describing the genome sequence was published on an online journal called De Novo (apparently the team performing the study had some trouble publishing their results so they decided to... buy an existing journal and renamed it). Unfortunately the scientists are trying to charge $30 to anyone wanting to view their research paper. Fortunately somebody was able to get their hands on a copy of the paper and found out that...
You can read more about it in this Ars Technica article.
Below is the abstract of the paper that, strange enough, cannot be found in PubMed.

Ketchum, M. S., Wojtkiewicz, P. W., Watts, A. B., Spence, D. W., Holzenburg, A. K., Toler, D. G., Prychitko, T. M., Zhang, F., Bollinger, S., Shoulders, R., Smith, R. 

Novel North American Hominins, Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies

DeNovo Scientific Journal, 2013, Vol. No. 1

One hundred eleven samples of blood, tissue, hair, and other types of specimens were studied, characterized and hypothesized to be obtained from elusive hominins in North America commonly referred to as Sasquatch. DNA was extracted and purified from a subset of these samples that survived rigorous screening for wildlife species identification. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing, specific genetic loci sequencing, forensic short tandem repeat (STR) testing, whole genome single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) bead array analysis, and next generation whole genome sequencing were conducted on purported Sasquatch DNA samples gathered from various locations in North America. Additionally, histopathologic and electron microscopic examination were performed on a large tissue sample. vel non-human DNA.

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