PRDM9 - Genetic Catalyst For Human Diversity
Monday, September 6, 2010 - 11:07
in Biology & Nature
A research team says they have discovered one of the key drivers of human evolution and diversity, accounting for changes that occur between different generations of people. Professor Alec Jeffreys, who discovered DNA fingerprinting at the University of Leicester in 1984, and has spent the decades since investigating what he describes as "pretty bizarre bits of DNA" - highly variable repeated parts of DNA called 'minisatellites' - found in the human genome. Jeffreys observed that these seemed to be changing and "picking up mutations at an extraordinary rate" when compared to other DNA. read more
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