WEBVTT

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[Dongya Yang]:We are there live with a specialty analyzing the DNA from ancient remains.

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[Dongya Yang]:Just recent, we started working on herring, ancient herring bone.

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[Dongya Yang]:So ancient herring bone is so small.

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[Dongya Yang]:Zoologists can do this identification to the species level.

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[Dongya Yang]:And for further identification and try to understand their genetic diversity,

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[Dongya Yang]:change over time.

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[Dongya Yang]:That change can be linked to climatic and human impact on those particular species.

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[Dongya Yang]:As you can see, it's going to be difficult to recover DNA from samples this small.

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[Dongya Yang]:And this is also kind of very old material.

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[Dongya Yang]:It's 2,000 years old kind of material.

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[Dongya Yang]:You have to use highly efficient DNA recovery technique, and you have to use dedicated lab facility to

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[Dongya Yang]:avoid contamination from the bone like this, a small tiny bit.

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[Dongya Yang]:You use a technique called the PCR amplification technique to amplify the tiny small amount of the ancient DNA to a huge amount for analysis of DNA sequencing.

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[Dongya Yang]:And it will tell us about genetic diversity of this particular species.

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[Dongya Yang]:So we have managed to recover and analyze the ancient herring DNA for as old as 5,000 years old.

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[Dongya Yang]:And we use the ancient DNA recovered from those remains to address many archaeological questions.