“Junk DNA” key to human evolution?

Sci­en­tists have iden­ti­fied a hand­ful that they say may have con­tri­but­ed to the ev­o­lu­tion­ary changes that en­abled peo­ple to use tools and walk up­right.
The find­ings sug­gest our ev­o­lu­tion may have been driv­en not only by changes in genes, but in ar­eas of the ge­nome once thought of as “junk DNA,” the re­search­ers said.

The re­sults come from a com­par­a­tive anal­y­sis of the hu­man, chim­pan­zee, rhe­sus ma­caque and oth­er ge­nomes re­ported in the Sept. 5 issue of the re­search jour­nal Sci­ence. The scientists noted al­tera­t­ions in this DNA that ac­ti­vat­ed genes in pri­mor­di­al thumb and big toe in a mouse em­bryo.

“Our study iden­ti­fies a po­ten­tial ge­net­ic con­trib­u­tor to fun­da­men­tal mor­pho­log­i­cal [struc­tur­al] dif­fer­ences be­tween hu­mans and apes,” said Yale Uni­ver­s­ity ge­net­icist James Noo­nan, the sen­ior au­thor.




Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080904_upright