OMG!! Humans are more closely related to chimps than to other humans!!!

A very interesting paper is now online at Nature. It is entitled 'Global variation in copy number in the human genome' (Redon et al., 2006). The full article is freely available online.We have recently had a number of threads discussing human/chimp genetics and the significance of indels on measurements of divergence and their significance to evolution. This paper studied copy number variations which include indels as well as duplications and more complex genetic events.This nature paper is a product of the haplotype mapping (HAPMAP) project which is being worked on by a number of HGP contributors such as the Sanger centre. The abstract is as follows... They identified 1,447 regions (CNVRs) in the genome where there were variations in copy number amongst the sampled genomes of sequences greater than 1Kb in size. These regions covered 12% of the genome altogether.They go on to show that copy number variations can be used to identify populations with putative common ancestry from european, asian and african populations.It would be interesting to see how these CNVRs compare to the regions of indels associated with the increased estimates in human chimp divergence. If both human and chimps can have as much as 12% variation based on CNVR's with populations then how much distinct difference do such factors present between the 2 species.This is really phenomenal work and as more organisms are studied at the same level of detail it opens up the possibility of identifying a vast area of functionally relevant variation both within and between mammalian species and throughout the animal kingdom. This also has major implications for the study of genetic differences affecting responses to medical treatments and to disease in general.There are at least 2 other CNV papers out related to this one, one in nature genetics (Khaja et al, 2006) and one in Genome Research which explains the technical methodology behind the comparisons in more detail(Fiegler et al., 2006)TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

Perhaps this needs a sexier title like 'OMG!! Humans are more closely related to chimps than to other humans!!!'.TTFN,WK

I'd have thought Biological Evolution was the most appropriate.TTFN,WK

*bump* to see if a crass headline title can attract anyone's attention.TTFN,WK

The paper is available without a subscription at the moment so you should be able to download it or read it online. No and yes. Copy nuber variation can encompass both expansion of repeat as in microsatellites and gene duplications. As I briefly mentioned in the OP it is simply any sequence of 1Kb or greater and which varies in representation from a base genome. They go on to characterise further... Over half of the identified CNVs overlap genes identified in the refseq database and more than 99% overlap highly convserved non-coding regions (but not ultra-conserved elements).TTFN,WK

I chnaged the title from its original sober incarnation, which I can no longer recall, as a cheap way of attracting peole to the thread, a move which still singularly failed to excite much interest.The basis of the title was the conflation by anti-evolutionist of virtually any measure of genetic distance as equivalent to any other and virtually interchangeable.When you look at the arguments of people like Eggasai who complain that because sequence similarity measured by a crude biochemical measure is not the same as when measured by a direct comparison of the genetic sequence, or that one based on SNPs is different from one based on indels, that there is some sort of cover up being perpetrated.Therefore published data suggesting a potential for divergence in ~12% of the genome between humans seems a prime target for the same sort of misconstruction.TTFN,WK