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Research Article

Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels

Roy J. Britten
  1. California Institute of Technology, 101 Dahlia Avenue, Corona del Mar, CA 92625

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PNAS October 15, 2002 99 (21) 13633-13635; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.172510699
Roy J. Britten
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  1. Contributed by Roy J. Britten

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Abstract

Five chimpanzee bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences (described in GenBank) have been compared with the best matching regions of the human genome sequence to assay the amount and kind of DNA divergence. The conclusion is the old saw that we share 98.5% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzee is probably in error. For this sample, a better estimate would be that 95% of the base pairs are exactly shared between chimpanzee and human DNA. In this sample of 779 kb, the divergence due to base substitution is 1.4%, and there is an additional 3.4% difference due to the presence of indels. The gaps in alignment are present in about equal amounts in the chimp and human sequences. They occur equally in repeated and nonrepeated sequences, as detected by repeatmasker (http://ftp.genome.washington.edu/RM/RepeatMasker.html).

  • base substitutions‖insertion
  • deletion differences‖DNA evolution

Footnotes

    • ↵* E-mail: rbritten{at}cco.caltech.edu.

  • Abbreviations

    BAC,
    bacterial artificial chromosome;
    NPH,
    normalized percent hybridization
    • Accepted August 22, 2002.
    • Copyright © 2002, The National Academy of Sciences
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    Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels
    Roy J. Britten
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2002, 99 (21) 13633-13635; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.172510699

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    Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels
    Roy J. Britten
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2002, 99 (21) 13633-13635; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.172510699
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    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 99 (21)
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