[music plays]
>>Dr. Lewis: Welcome! Well as you can see, it’s been a few months since our last video
recording. I’ve gained a little hair on my face and I’ve lost a little hair on my
head. And we’re here today to take a look at the Stephenson Research and Technology
Center at the University of Oklahoma. Now this facility was designed to bring together
scientists that do somewhat similar research, but also take a different angle to it. So
there’s a potential for them to collaborate and maybe even create a whole new science.
Now this has worked really well for us. We have the laboratories of molecular anthropology
and microbiome research here in this facility, and this is a place where we study ancient DNA. And
here to talk a little bit about ancient DNA is the code director of our laboratories,
Dr. Christina Warinner.
>>Dr. Warinner: Thanks Cecil! It’s such a pleasure to be here today, and I’m really
excited about taking you on a tour. And before we get started I just want to just say a few brief introductory
words about ancient DNA and what it is. Sometimes we have evolutionary questions that it’s
very difficult to answer with only the living descendants of the time period from which
we have these particular questions. This is where ancient DNA becomes very useful. Ancient
DNA means going into the archeological or paleontological record, finding traces of
remains, and extracting DNA from them. We can read the sequences of those DNAs and investigate
these evolutionary questions directly. But working with ancient DNA has its difficulties.
As you might imagine, being so old, the DNA is degraded and very sensitive to contamination
from the modern world, which is all around us. And so we have to build a special ancient
DNA laboratory that is built to keep modern DNA out and protect the ancient DNA inside.
So I’m going to take you on a tour so you can see these highly specialized facilities
that we’re lucky to have here at the University of Oklahoma. So come on!
>>Dr. Lewis: All right, let’s do it. Oh good, the lights are on. I can’t wait to
show them this facility. This is the facility from the outside, but we’re going to see
it from the inside.
>>Dr. Warinner: And this is a brand new facility. As we go through, you’ll see there’s no
equipment inside. And that’s because it’s just been built. We just had a major upgrade:
new facilities, new bench tops. [music plays] We’re so excited.
>>Dr. Lewis: Well one great thing about our open office area is that we can actually see
the ancient DNA facility from our offices.
>>Dr. Warinner: And here we have two of our graduate students who have been conducting
research in the ancient DNA lab – Allie and Andrew.
>>Dr. Lewis: How’s it going guys?
>>Allie: Good.
>>Andrew: Good. >>Dr. Warinner: They’re currently analyzing
their data from different projects that they’ve been conducting. But let’s go ahead and take
a look at the inside. [moves inside of lab] Welcome to our new ancient DNA laboratories.
I’m so excited to give you a sneak peek of what is to come. Now normally, in this
laboratory we require specialized protective clothing – not to protect us from the materials,
but to protect our ancient, precious materials from ourselves; from the DNA on our own bodies.
But since this laboratory is still under construction, we can go ahead and come through in our street
clothes, because it hasn’t been fully sterilized yet. This first room that we’re in is our
storage room; this is where we’re going to be keeping all of our supplies, our chemicals,
and some of our samples as they come in the door from our collaborators from around the world.
The entire laboratory put together is six rooms. And as we proceed through each
room, it becomes cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner, so finally in the last two rooms
– those are the rooms in which we analyze our ancient DNA. Where we pull the DNA out
of fossilized bones and other materials in order to analyze the DNA sequences. Those
rooms have to be extremely clean, and they’re far in the interior. But let’s go ahead
and take a tour through each of the rooms in the order in which a sample was processed.
So as I said before, this is the first stop of an ancient DNA sample in our lab where
it gets stored and cataloged. Next we move into this room, which will be our photography
room. Here we’ll photograph the samples – maybe even sub-sample them into smaller
pieces that are more manageable to analyze. You’ll also see that here behind the door
we have a changing room. And this is where analysts will come in and change into their
specialized clothing that they’ll be wearing for the rest of the lab. Now after this laboratory,
we move into our microscopy room. Sometimes we need to – before we conduct our analysis
– look at our samples a little bit more closely. And to do this we’ll have the aid
of microscopes to help us select exactly which parts of a sample we might want to analyze.
Next we proceed into the wet lab. This lab has a sink, and it also has a specialized
chemical fume hood and biological safety cabinet that’s necessary in case some of the analysis
that we require…involve chemicals that are volatile or dangerous. This is a safety precaution
here that protects us from some of these chemicals that are necessary to extract DNA or to manipulate
proteins, which we also do in this lab. I’m standing here – right in front of me are
the two cleanest rooms in the whole laboratory. This is really the heart of the ancient DNA
laboratory. They’re identical rooms; and on the left side will be processing ancient
microbiome samples. So samples from dental plaque, dental calculus, and also coprolite,
which is fossilized human feces. And on the right side is where we’ll be processing
ancient samples from dentin and bone. This is where we get material to understand the
host genome – the human genome – and we’ll do that in this room right here. We have special
laminar flow hoods that protect the sample to an even greater degree. It’s a very,
very clean environment. We also have chemical fume hoods that are mobile, on wheels, again,
in case we have to use any dangerous chemicals during this process. After we extract the
ancient DNA molecules, we need to prepare them for sequencing. We do the first step
of that here, but the next step happens in the modern laboratories. So let’s go talk
to Dr. Lewis who will explain how that works.
>>Dr. Lewis: So the samples from the ancient DNA facility leave in a protective chamber
– sealed so they can’t be contaminated by modern DNA. Then we do some chemistry on
these samples. The ancient samples are amplified by a technique called the polymerase chain reaction.
After the polymerase chain reaction, the ancient DNA template is now modern DNA – modern
copies of DNA that matched that ancient template. Those modern samples,
those modern materials can be sequenced and analyzed in all the different ways genomics
and genetics has available to us to study in science today. So thank you for joining
us on this tour of the ancient DNA facilities within the Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology
and Microbiome Research at the Stephenson Research and Technology Center at the University
of Oklahoma.