Report of the sixteenth GAbridge project journal club, February 3rd, 2026

 

The sixteenth GAbridge journal club took place on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026. PhD student Ivana Keršić presented the paper "Ancient cattle genomics, origins, and rapid turnover in the Fertile Crescent" (Verdugo et al., 2019). The paper represents the first major study and analysis of whole-genome sequences of ancient cattle and aurochs, the results and sequences of which have been used in the datasets of almost all papers on ancient cattle since then. The focus of the meeting was on the methods and analysis pipeline presented in the paper, where we observed and discussed the improvements of the software used from 2019 to today, as well as new programs that were not available to the original researchers at the time, which we can use.