Although it may not be as dramatic as the Big Bang birthing the universe, an explosion of DNA duplication in the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas may be responsible for many of the differences among the species, a new study suggests. The big blowup happened 8 million to 12 million years ago, but its effects are still apparent today.
Human and great ape genes are notoriously similar, with few differences in the genetic letters that make up the instruction manual for building each of the primates. But gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and humans are obviously different. A new analysis of the entire genomes of humans and their ape cousins, published in the Feb. 11 Nature, suggests the differences may have roots in DNA duplications.
Researchers led by Evan Eichler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Washington in Seattle, compared the genomes of macaques, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans. The scientists found that chunks of the genomes had been copied and rearranged, sometimes multiple times, within each of the lineages.