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Katherine Pollard: A Genetic Analysis

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Katherine Pollard, a biostatisician at Gladstone Institutes at University of California, San Francisco has worked to identify DNA sequences that set the human genome apart from chimpanzees since 2003. She wrote a computer program to identify the DNA sequences that differ between humans and chimpanzees. Pollard explains the “ticking of the molecular clock” rate of change in genetic mutation by saying that “…those parts of the code that have undergone the most modification since the chimp-human split are the sequences that most likely shaped humankind.” In November of 2004, after months of work developing a computer program that would sift through 2,000 plus DNA letters per second, Pollard finally had her list of rapidly evolving DNA sequences. …show more content…

Though HAR1 was present in other species, it had evolved extremely slowly until the emergence of humans. “The fact that HAR1 was essentially frozen in time through hundreds of millions of years indicates that it does something very important; that it then underwent abrupt revision in humans suggests that this function was significantly modified in our lineage,” writes Pollard. HAR1 is named so because it seems to have rapidly evolved after humans and chimpanzees split from a common ancestor. HAR1 is also unique in that it does not encode a protein. Before the research done and discoveries made by the Human Genome Project, scientists previously thought that all genes required proteins as the building blocks to their sequencing. Researchers now know that these protein-encoded genes make up only 1.5 percent of our DNA. The other 98.5 percent – sometimes referred to as junk DNA – contains regulatory sequences that tell other genes when to turn on and off. “…You do not need to change very much of the genome to make a new species. The way to evolve a human from a chimp-human ancestor is not to speed the ticking of the molecular clock as a

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