We are seeking a highly motivated Post-Doctoral Research Fellow to join our research team at Reading, focusing on sedimentary DNA (sedaDNA / environmental DNA) from soils and sediments from the project’s case study regions in Spain and North Africa. You will contribute to the reconstruction of past landscapes and human-environment interactions through the analysis of sedimentary DNA. This includes analysing samples from terraces, irrigated fields and archaeological sites, and using eDNA metagenomics and metabarcoding approaches for multi-species detection, with the aim of characterising changing plant and animal species diversity and richness over time. The position will involve fieldwork, laboratory work, data analysis, and collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, palaeoecologists and historians.

AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

How heritable is human life span? If genetic heritability is high, longevity genes can reveal aging mechanisms and inform medicine and public health. However, current estimates of heritability are low...

Nature Communications - Genetic predictors of health outcomes often drop in accuracy when applied to people dissimilar to participants of large genetic studies. Here, the authors investigate the...

Knowledge of a trait's "genetic architecture," namely the joint distribution of allele frequencies of causal variants and the direction and magnitude of their effects, is essential to understanding it...

Openings

Promise and pitfalls of using large biobanks to study impacts of archaic protein-coding variants in living humans.

Nature Reviews Genetics - Ancient DNA techniques are being applied to study increasingly diverse pathogens of the past. The authors review the latest insights into pathogen–host coevolution,...

The genomes of 28 ancient southern African individuals dated to between 10,200 and 150 years before present offer insights into the evolution of Homo sapiens.

The multi-millennia-long history between dogs and humans has placed them at the forefront of archaeological and genomic research. Despite ongoing e...

The domestic cat (Felis catus) descends from the African wildcat Felis lybica lybica. Its global distribution alongside humans testifies to its successful adaptation to anthropogenic environments. Unc...

The multi-millennia-long history between dogs and humans has placed them at the forefront of archaeological and genomic research. Despite ongoing e...

Dogs evolved through interactions between people and gray wolves during the Late Pleistocene and have been ubiquitous in human societies ever since...

Opie and Atkinson conduct a global phylogenetic analysis of 868 cultures and find evidence indicating that cereal grain cultivation, not agricultural surplus, drove state formation. Their findings als...

A new cohort of exceptional researchers at have been awarded funding through the Royal Society’s early career schemes, the University Research Fellowship (URF), Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (DHF) and Ne...