Characterization and potential functional significance of human-chimpanzee large INDEL variation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Although humans and chimpanzees have accumulated significant differences in a number of phenotypic traits since diverging from a common ancestor about six million years ago, their genomes are more than 98.5% identical at protein-coding loci. This modest degree of nucleotide divergence is not sufficient to explain the extensive phenotypic differences between the two species. It has been hypothesized that the genetic basis of the phenotypic differences lies at the level of gene regulation and is associated with the extensive insertion and deletion (INDEL) variation between the two species. To test the hypothesis that large INDELs (80 to 12,000 bp) may have contributed significantly to differences in gene regulation between the two species, we categorized human-chimpanzee I

SUBMITTER: Polavarapu N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3215961 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature