For the new year, let’s look at where new genes come from. Many genes around today have pedigrees going back billions of years. Humans can find analogues of most of their genes in chimpanzees and other primates, suggesting our common ancestor millions of years ago had comparable genes. At the same time, many species including humans have genes found in no other species. As with so many things–to-do lists, spreadsheets, computer code, building plans–there are two main ways to get new ones: copy and modify something existing, or start from scratch. A newly published paper by Ni A. An et al (covered in this news article, if you prefer) explores in substantial detail the pathway by which some human-specific genes came about via the “from scratch” or de novo method. The twenty co-authors further demonstrated that one of these genes could play a role in how human brains came to be larger than chimpanzee brains.
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