[[So I will try to walk you through the most recent findings in the amazing world of nucleic acids and the key importance of non-coding DNA.]]
This is exactly why i asked exdemmom what % of the genes were to be discounted and what % similarity this would wind up being between chimps and humans- i got no answer- She caled the author of the original article a liar- deceiver or soem such ridiculing comment- psuedoscience was another big bash- but when asked she couldn’t brign herself to answer the question
[[This is great stuff and reflects how intricate, multifunctional and complex DNA is.]]
That’s what i was wondering- how much of the ‘irrelevant’ coding was actually relevant, or even species specific- I noted she was careful to say “”Little” to “None” function- one of the sites i listed stated that when they come up with the 98% figure they do so throwing out important coding- granted, all may not be essential, but I’m sure some was more essential than others but still thrown out- which again is why i asked for a guesstimate on how much actual ‘irrelevant’ coding we’re actually talking about?
It’s all essential. This paragraph from the Smithsonian describes the issue well
—
Geneticists have come up with a variety of ways of calculating the percentages, which give different impressions about how similar chimpanzees and humans are. The 1.2% chimp-human distinction, for example, involves a measurement of only substitutions in the base building blocks of those genes that chimpanzees and humans share. A comparison of the entire genome, however, indicates that segments of DNA have also been deleted, duplicated over and over, or inserted from one part of the genome into another. When these differences are counted, there is an additional 4 to 5% distinction between the human and chimpanzee genomes.
—
In other words the regions shared between the species are 98% or more on average.
But human have sequences chinos don’t have and vice versa. So the overall identity or similarity is 95% or so. The original press release from NIH in 2005 states 96%.
This includes the extra/missing regions that ExDemMom criticized the author for including.
This author is saying that the 95-96% figure is higher, in his opinion, than it actually is and better characterization of the Chimp sequence would show this.
He could be correct, or not, but it would be difficult to determine and the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium isn’t going to spend resources on a review.
The original 2005 article is here.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/full/nature04072.html
This author argues for a large margin of error and the probability of a lesser identity percent based on certain technical aspects described in the article, e.g.
“The observable insertions fall into two classes: (1) ‘completely covered’ insertions, occurring within continuous sequence in both species; and (2) ‘incompletely covered’ insertions, occurring within sequence containing one or more gaps in the chimpanzee, but revealed by a clear discrepancy between the species in sequence length. Different methods are needed for reliable identification of modest-sized insertions (1 base to 15kb) and large insertions (> 15kb), with the latter only being reliably identifiable in the human genome (see Supplementary Information ‘Genome evolution’).”
Which means not all the sequences are accounted for, and also that only 94% of the Chimp genome was sequenced:
“The draft genome assembly—generated from ~3.6-fold sequence redundancy of the autosomes and ~1.8-fold redundancy of both sex chromosomes—covers ~94% of the chimpanzee genome with >98% of the sequence in high-quality bases.”
Since this report I am not sure how many blanks have been filled in or what more analysis or publications have been done.