HUMANS and their closest relatives, chimpanzees, may be more different than geneticists have realised. A comparison of the chimpanzee’s chromosome 22 and its counterpart, human chromosome 21, shows that just 1.44 per cent of the chromosomes’ 33.3 million DNA bases are different. The study also revealed nearly 68,000 insertions or deletions of DNA, most of which were only a few bases long.
But because each gene contains hundreds or thousands of bases, even these differences are enough to alter more than 80 per cent of the proteins produced by those genes, according to the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium…
