However, the team said that they could not be sure the Chlorobium species they had discovered was actually extinct. Some scientists believe that researchers should not be creating biological specimens that do not already exist in nature. Microbes are nature’s greatest chemists and among their creations are many of the world’s antibiotics and other therapeutic drugs.īacteria have inhabited the Earth for more than three billion years, so experts believe it might be possible to find new potent molecules by searching in the past.īringing back ancient bacteria or molecules has proved controversial.

Scientists are continually hunting in nature for bioactive molecules that can be useful for medicine or industry, and many are produced by microbes such as bacteria. “The next step is to test these molecules, for instance if they have antibiotic properties.” At this stage, however, we can only speculate. “We presume that these compounds are signal molecules that the organism uses to 'communicate' with each other or to regulate specific functions of the bacterium. This allowed us to generate the molecules that we termed paleofurans,” said Pierre Stallforth, professor of bioorganic chemistry, at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research. “We deciphered a section of the DNA from an ancient bacterium and recreated it. Scientists are unsure what the molecules do but said the process may be useful for discovering extinct molecules lost to history that might be useful in medicine as antibiotics. They found the ancient genes produced a never-before-seen family of natural molecules which researchers have named “paleofurans”. Ancient bacterial DNA from the teeth of Neanderthals has been recreated by scientists for the first time and used to bring back Stone Age molecules.Įxperts reconstructed the genome of a previously unknown Chlorobium bacteria dating from the Pleistocene, which was found in the dental plaque of Neanderthals, and seven Palaeolithic humans dating from up to 100,000 years ago.Īn international team of US and German researchers then spliced the sequence into living bacteria to see what would happen.

Neanderthal kindred