Interviewee: Svante Paabo.
Evolutionary geneticist Svante Paabo speaks about differences between active human and chimp genes in different organs.
(DNAi Location: Applications > Human origins > Comparisons > DNA > Comparing chimp and human genes)
Transcript:
So what we looked at were three different tissues. We looked at blood, we looked at liver and we looked at brain. And what we find is that about as many genes differ in each of these tissues, about 15/18% of the genes differ. But in the brain what's special is that when we compare humans to chimp, and compare also to an orangutan, what we find is that most of these differences that happened on the evolutionary line to humans actually happened in the ancestor to humans, and not in the ancestor to the chimpanzee. So it seems that our brain has changed particularly much on the line to human.
There are only 50 human genes that have no homolog in chimps. Differences between the two species are, therefore, due more to changes in gene regulation.