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Gene explosion set humans, great apes apart
Wed Feb 11, 2009 9:45pm EST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An eruption of a poorly understood kind of
genetic change set humans apart from great apes, and also sets chimps,
gorillas and orangutans apart from monkeys, researchers reported on
Wednesday.
Right before the great apes branched off from other apes and monkeys
10 million years ago, their DNA began to make explosive changes -- not
classic mutations, but another change known as copy number variation,
University of Washington geneticist Evan Eichler and colleagues found.
These changes in DNA sequences may help explain what makes humans --
and other apes -- unique, they report in the journal Nature.
"These are really like volcanoes in the genome, blowing out pieces of DNA,"
Eichler said in a statement.
Eichler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher, and his team
analyzed the DNA of a human, a chimpanzee and an orangutan, as well as
of a macaque monkey. Looking at species known to be at various
distances on the evolutionary tree can act as a kind of time machine to
track changes over millennia.
As expected, they found humans and chimps were very close in terms
of overall sequence. The main differences lie in copy number variations
-- repeats of the same genetic sequence over and over, deletions of the
sequence, or even instances in which a sequence runs backward.
Among humans, these variations have been associated with diseases
ranging from AIDS to autism. They may also underlie the differences
between species, Eichler said.
The analysis suggested that in the ancestral branch of primates
leading to humans and the African great apes, the number of these
duplications began to increase at the same time that the more classic
genetic mutations were slowing down.
Humans and chimps, in particular, tend to have extra copies of these sequences,
they reported.
"There's a big burst of activity that happens where genomes are suddenly
rearranged and changed," Eichler said.
"There is the possibility that these genes might be important for
language or for aspects of cognition, though much more work has to be
done before we'll be able to say that for sure."
(Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by Xavier Briand)
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