Stronger Positive Selection on Chimp than on Human Genomes

[shernren]

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/416/1?etoc

The study "challenges the idea that there was a great burst of adaptive change in humans, one that was more profound than in other primates or mammals," says Morris Goodman, an evolutionary biologist at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan.

Comments?

 

[Assyrian]

Interesting articles in New Scientist this week on the Rhesus genome

http://www.newscientist.com/channel...0-chimps-are-the-most-refined-ape-of-all.html
Evolutionary geneticist Jianzhi Zhang and his colleagues at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, compared DNA sequences for 13,888 human, chimp and rhesus macaque genes. For each DNA letter at which the human or chimp genes differ from the ancestral form - represented by the corresponding gene in macaques - they noted whether the change led to an altered protein. Genes that have been transformed by natural selection show an unusually high proportion of these mutations.
Zhang's team found that 233 chimp genes, compared with only 154 human ones, have been changed by selection since chimps and humans split from their common ancestor about 6 million years ago (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0701705104).

Chimps really are most evolved

They think it is down to the smaller size of human population in the past, our genome was more open to random fluctuations in gene frequencies.