General Chat

In ScienceNOW this week, geneticists around the world have been dealt a ‘curve ball’ according to Huntington Willard of Duke University in North Carolina following the discovery of some rather interesting changes to the composition of the Y chromosome in chimps and humans.

Long written off as being stagnant and decaying by scientists, a team of researchers led by David Page from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA have actually discovered that the Y chromosome is a hot spot of evolution.

It is widely known we share 98% of our DNA with chimps, but they have found that there’s a massive 30% difference between the two species on the Y chromosome.

This not only points to an extraordinary change in the chromosome since we split from our common ancestor some 6 million years ago, but because chimps have lost lots of the genes that are still present in humans, it means that we are actually more closely linked to our common ancestors than they are.

The team made these discoveries by sequencing the Y chromosome in both species. One thing of key note that they found in chimps is that while they have lost 30% of the genes they share with humans, they have also gained large sections of DNA which are the mirror image of the sequencing on its complementary strand.
Furthermore, they suggest that this ‘prefabrication’ of genes has come about because the Y cannot exchange genes with the X chromosome anymore.