Word: chimp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...finished plots--a man who gets treated for cancer and survives, only to find that unscrupulous doctors have patented his family's cancer-resistant cell line and are trying to harvest it by force from his relatives. Also, a scientist who inadvertently crosses his genes with that of a chimp and creates a talking monkey. And some other scientist who comes up with a gene-therapy treatment that makes irresponsible people more mature. Had enough? No? There's a transgenic parrot that does math and quotes old movies...
...comparison remains a powerful one, and just a year ago geneticists got hold of a long-awaited tool for making those comparisons in bulk. Although the news was largely overshadowed by the impact of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the same week, the publication of a rough draft of the chimp genome in the journal Nature immediately told scientists several important things. First, they learned that overall, the sequences of base pairs that make up both species' genomes differ by 1.23%--a ringing confirmation of the 1970s estimates--and that the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly...
...long strings of letters are duplicated, creating multiple copies in the offspring. Sometimes they're deleted altogether or even picked up, turned around and reinserted backward. A group led by geneticist Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto has identified 1,576 apparent inversions between the chimp and human genomes; more than half occurred sometime during human evolution...
When an inversion, deletion or duplication occurs in an unused portion of the genome, nothing much changes--and indeed, the human, chimp and other genomes are full of such inert stretches of DNA. When it happens in a gene or in a functional noncoding stretch, by contrast, an inversion or a duplication is often harmful. But sometimes, purely by chance, the change gives the new organism some sort of advantage that enables it to produce more offspring, thus perpetuating the change in another generation...
...that's not the most startling finding. Reich's team also found that the entire human X chromosome diverged from the chimp's X chromosome about 1.2 million years later than the other chromosomes. One plausible explanation is that chimps and humans first split but later interbred from time to time before finally going their separate evolutionary ways. That could explain why some of the most ancient fossils now considered human ancestors have such striking mixtures of chimp and human traitssome could actually have been hybrids. Or they might have simply coexisted with, or even predated, the last common ancestor...