Thumbs up -- a tiny ancestral remnant lends developmental edge to humans

Thursday, September 4, 2008 - 16:14 in Biology & Nature

Subtle genetic changes that confer an evolutionary advantage upon a species, such as the dexterity characteristic of the human hand, while difficult to detect and even harder to reproduce in a model system, have nevertheless generated keen interest amongst evolutionary biologists. In findings published online in the September 5 edition of the journal Science, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their collaborators, have uncovered a specifically human 13-nucelotide change concealed in the vast three-billion-letter landscape of the human genome.

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