Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels
- Creators
- Britten, Roy J.
Abstract
Five chimpanzee bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences (described in GenBank) have been compared with the best matching regions of the human genome sequence to assay the amount and kind of DNA divergence. The conclusion is the old saw that we share 98.5% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzee is probably in error. For this sample, a better estimate would be that 95% of the base pairs are exactly shared between chimpanzee and human DNA. In this sample of 779 kb, the divergence due to base substitution is 1.4%, and there is an additional 3.4% difference due to the presence of indels. The gaps in alignment are present in about equal amounts in the chimp and human sequences. They occur equally in repeated and nonrepeated sequences, as detected by REPEATMASKER (http://ftp.genome.washington.edu/RM/RepeatMasker.html).
Additional Information
© 2002 by the National Academy of Sciences. Contributed by Roy J. Britten, August 22, 2002. Published online before print October 4, 2002. I thank John Williams for help in data processing and DNA sequence comparisons.Attached Files
Published - BRIpnas02.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC129726
- Eprint ID
- 7586
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:BRIpnas02
- Created
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2007-03-08Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-06-01Created from EPrint's last_modified field