The colleagues of RCH IAG at the HunLifeSci2021 international conference

Six members of RCH IAG participated at the Hungarian Molecular Life Science Conference 2021 between 05-07 November 2021 in Eger where the projects of the Institute of Archeogenomics were presented to representatives of the life sciences.

Through the lectures of Dániel Gerber and Bea Szeifert and the posters of Noémi Borbély and Erzsébet Fóthi, researchers and students were able to gain insights into the prehistoric, early medieval and present-day population genetic researchers carried out in our Institute.

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Origin of domestic horses finally established

• The modern horse was domesticated around 2200 years BCE in the northern Caucasus.
• In the centuries that followed it spread throughout Asia and Europe.
• To achieve this result, an international team of 162 scientists collected, sequenced and compared 273 genomes from ancient horses scattered across Eurasia.

Horses were first domesticated in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, northern Caucasus, before conquering the rest of Eurasia within a few centuries. These are the results of a study led by paleogeneticist Ludovic Orlando, CNRS, who headed an international team including archaeologist, archaeozoologist and geneticist researchers of the Research Centre for the Humanities. Answering a decades-old enigma, the study is published in Nature on 20 October 2021.

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An ethical statement on DNA testing of human remains has been published in the Nature

The statement, compiled and signed by 68 researchers from 31 countries, has been initiated by David Reich's laboratory at the Harvard Medical School. The starting point was an online, global, and multidisciplinary workshop in November 2020 focused on discussing ethical issues and guidelines for archaeogenetic research.

The rapid growth of ancient DNA and its impact on archaeology (and other fields) has led to calls for a discussion about the ethical standards to govern such research. The best practices for sampling of human remains for scientific analysis and engagement with stakeholder groups are key ethical discussions researchers are having about ancient DNA. While some guidelines have been previously proposed, there is no "one-size fits all" approach to ancient DNA ethics because of the notable variation in research contexts worldwide. What has been missing is a set of principles that can apply everywhere around the world that a substantial number of researchers from different disciplines and based in different places around the world agree to follow.

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Second ERC HistoGenes plenary meeting in Vienna

Between September 23-25th, the ERC HistoGenes group held its second plenary meeting in Vienna. During the three-day meeting, project participants presented and discussed the results of the first research year and identified the future key research directions and strategy. Our institute was represented by Anna Szécsényi-Nagy and Balázs Mende at the event. From the spring of 2020 until September 2021, the ERC team of the Institute of Archeogaenomics collected nearly 3,000 Migraton Period human DNA samples together with the staff of the Institute of Archeological Sciences of Eötvös Loránd University and prepared them for complete genomic analysis in our institute's ancient DNA laboratory. In addition to the Hungarian samples, our deputy director Balázs Mende visited with our archaeologists (István Koncz, Levente Samu) and anthropologist (Olga Spekker) fellows collaborating institutes in Serbia, Slovenia and Slovakia in order to collect 4-9th century human DNA samples for the project.

For further events of the project visit the HistoGenes webpage: https://www.histogenes.org/

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