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The male sex chromosome, long dismissed as the underachieving runt of the genome, has now been fully sequenced in a common chimpanzee. And comparison with its human counterpart - the only other Y chromosome to have been sequenced in such detail - reveals a rate of change that puts the rest of the genome to shame.
The common chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human Y chromosomes are "horrendously different from each other", says David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. "It looks like there's been a dramatic renovation or reinvention of the Y chromosome in the chimpanzee and human lineages."
Sex chromosomes evolved some 200 million-300 million years ago, but the chimpanzee and human lineages diverged only 6 million-7 million years ago. Comparisons of the chimp and human genomes suggested that not much has changed between the species since1.
But those analyses excluded the Y chromosome, much of the genetic sequence of which is made...