Name uchin adamlar maymynlardan has akylly (Why humans are brainier than chimps)

A new study sheds light on why humans are so much more intelligent than

chimpanzees despite sharing almost 99% of the same DNA.

Though humans have much the same genes as chimps, it seems that this

genetic information can behave differently in the two species.

When researchers looked how genes operate in human and chimp livers,

brains and blood, they found the biggest differences in the brains.

The work could help understand how humans evolved and why some diseases

affected the two species differently, Dr Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck

Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told BBC News

Online.

Medical potential

Chimpanzees infected with HIV tend not to contract AIDS.

The species also tends to contract different types of cancer.

"Chimpanzees tend to have a lot fewer tumours in epithelial

tissues like the breast, colon, and prostate but just as much leukaemia,"

said Dr Pääbo.

An insight into why this happens might have the potential to lead to

new therapies.

Dr Pääbo’s team compared brain and liver tissue samples from three

humans and three chimpanzees, all of whom had died of natural causes.

’Gene chip’ analysis

They also took blood samples from live subjects.

They used microarrays known as "gene chips" to examine how

each of around 12,000 human genes was functioning in the tissue.

The reason the human-chimp differences are biggest in the brain tissue

samples is, they suspect, a consequence of the way human genes in the organ

changed rapidly during evolution.

This adaptation might explain how humans came to be so much more

intelligent than their ape counterparts.

Mountain to climb

It also serves to highlight the complexity of the task of making sense

of the mountains of data produced by endeavours such as the human genome

project.

Scientists need to do more than know how many genes we have and where

they lie on our chromosomes; they also need to discover how these genes work in

living bodies.

For, as the Leipzig study shows, the same genes can work in different

ways.

"We’re going to be looking now at why the differences exist,"

Dr Pääbo said.

"We want to focus much more on the brain and find out if there are

bits of the brain which did not undergo accelerated development in

humans."

He and his colleagues describe their work in the journal Science.

By Ivan Noble

BBC News Online

Source : news.bbc.co.uk

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