Genome Shows Humans More Gorilla-like than Thought

Study confirms humans, great apes separated from common ancestor

March 23, 2012

Kamilah, a 34-year old female lowland gorilla who lives in the San Diego Zoo, is the first gorilla to have her genome sequenced.

Humans and chimps separated from a common ancestor six million years ago, while gorillas split off from that common ancestor four million years before that, confirms a new study, published in Nature.

Sixty scientists worked over five years to sequence the genome of a single female lowland gorilla, the last of the great apes to have its DNA mapped.

According to lead author Aylwyn Scally, of the Trust Genome Campus of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England, even with that evolutionary distance, humans and gorillas have a lot more in common, genetically, than previously thought.

“The passage of ancestry across the three genomes changes from position to position," Scally says. "Although most of the human genome is indeed closer to chimpanzee on average, there’s a sizable minority, 15 percent is in fact closer to gorilla. And another 15 percent is where chimpanzee and gorilla are closest.”

Ninety-eight percent of human and gorilla genes are identical; humans and chimps share 99 percent of their DNA. Co-author Chris Tyler-Smith, also with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, says it’s those relatively few genes that differ between the species that are of special interest.