Humanos e chimpanzés são 80% diferentes

Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees

Galina Glazkoa, b, Vamsi Veeramachanenia, b, Masatoshi Neia, b and Wojciech Makałowski, a, b,

aInstitute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

bDepartment of Biology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA


Received 12 August 2004; revised 1 October 2004; accepted 5 November 2004. Received by T. Gojobori. Available online 29 January 2005.

Gene
Volume 346, 14 February 2005, Pages 215-219

Abstract

The chimpanzee is our closest living relative. The morphological differences between the two species are so large that there is no problem in distinguishing between them. However, the nucleotide difference between the two species is surprisingly small. The early genome comparison by DNA hybridization techniques suggested a nucleotide difference of 1–2%. Recently, direct nucleotide sequencing confirmed this estimate. These findings generated the common belief that the human is extremely close to the chimpanzee at the genetic level. However, if one looks at proteins, which are mainly responsible for phenotypic differences, the picture is quite different, and about 80% of proteins are different between the two species. Still, the number of proteins responsible for the phenotypic differences may be smaller since not all genes are directly responsible for phenotypic characters.

Keywords: Human; Chimpanzee; Genetic distance; Protein identity; Nucleotide identity

Abbreviations: PAM, percent of accepted mutations; MHC, major histocompability complex; ds, synonymous substitution distance; dn, nonsynonymous substitution distance; PBL, Pamilo–Bianki–Li method; mNG, modified Nei-Gojobori method; NCBI, National Center for Biotechnology Information; GO, Gene Ontology

Article Outline

1. Introduction
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Apes protein sequences
2.2. Assignment of orthology relationships
2.3. Statistical analysis
2.4. Database of orthologous genes
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Statistical properties of the data
3.2. Evolutionary analysis of human and chimpanzee orthologs
4. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References


Corresponding author. Department of Biology, Pennsylvania State University, 514 Muelle Lab, University Park, PA 16802, USA.

DOI

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