Biologists within the international consortium Zoonomia announced the completion of a 20-year project aimed at finding the main difference between humans and animals.
The scientific journal Science told about the grandiose work. The result of the work of scientists was 11 scientific articles, as well as received samples from more than 50 scientific organizations from around the world.
As part of the scientific work, the researchers analyzed the genomes of 241 animals from various families, and also compared with the human DNA sequence. The results obtained made it possible to understand exactly when we began to change and gradually turned into the people we are today.
There are more than 6,500 modern species of mammals known in the world and about 20,000 extinct ones. Despite the anatomical similarity, they are all different. The task of scientists was to identify the features of DNA that determined species differences and further evolution.
Using the method of comparative genetics, experts were able to determine the genomic zones responsible for traits such as a keen sense of smell, the habit of hibernating, as well as the ability to make sounds and develop the brain. This helped to establish that the diversity of mammals began to increase long before the extinction of the dinosaurs, which happened 66 million years ago.
“One of the main problems is that a person has a very large genome, and we don’t fully know how it works,” said Elinor Karlsson, one of the leaders of the Zoonomia project.
To understand it, the researchers decided to study the genomes of other mammals. Thanks to this, it turned out that scientists do not know about more than half of the regulatory elements in humans, which are 10 times more than those that encode proteins, and they play an important role in controlling physiological processes in our body.
In addition, it became known that about 11% of the genome is identical in all mammals, including humans. They are known as conserved pieces of DNA that have been preserved for millions of years and are responsible for the traits that distinguish mammals from other organisms.
According to scientists, the main difference between humans and, for example, primates, are areas in the genome associated with the development of the brain. These are the so-called “zones of accelerated human development”, which contain genes that differ from those of monkeys.
They arose about a million years ago, and in this case we are not talking about some special “gene of consciousness”, but only about the restructuring of the protein packaging of DNA, writes RIA News .
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