Two genes found in humans that are unlike any known

Humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. According to a study published

in the journal Cell Reports, after this stage in the bodyHumans continued to develop completely new genes. Some of them emerged from regions of the genome that had long been considered “junk.”

Scientists have studied the human genome in search ofevidence of the “birth” of completely new genes. In particular, they looked for so-called de novo genes. They arise spontaneously from fragments of DNA that code not for proteins, but for molecules that turn genes on and off or perform other functions in the cell. It's as if they were developing code from scratch, rather than iterating on protein-coding DNA that already existed in the cell.

In a new study, scientists found 155created from scratch human genes that code for tiny proteins or microproteins, many of which contain fewer than 100 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. And two of them are especially specific to humans. As the scientists explain, they did not appear in any of the other animal genomes studied. They appeared after humans separated from chimpanzees.

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