Scientists Sequence Chimp Genome

The first draft version of the genome sequence of Pan troglodytes, the chimpanzee, has been announced by the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

Chimpanzees are the most closely related species to humans. Therefore, a comparative analysis of the human and chimp genomes can reveal unique types of information not available from the genomes of other animals. An international team of scientists is currently comparing the chimp and human genome sequences and plans to publish results of its analysis in the next several months. The sequence was assembled by NHGRI-funded teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University (both in Cambridge, MA, USA), as well as a team from the Genome Sequencing Center, Washington University School of Medicine (Saint Louis, MO, USA).

The initial assembly, based on four-fold sequence coverage of the chimp genome, has been deposited into the public database of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, called Genbank (www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov). In turn, GenBank will distribute the sequence data to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database EMBL-Bank and the DNA Data Bank of Japan, DDBI. To facilitate biomedical studies comparing regions of the chimp genome with those of the human genome, the researchers have aligned the draft version of the chimp sequence with the human sequence.




Related Links:
Human Genome Research Institute
GenBank