Visualizing the Similarity of Human and Chimp DNA

Eamonn Keogh,  Stefano Lonardi, Victor B. Zordan, Sang-Hee Lee and Manel Jara.

University of California - Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521

The recent publication of the complete chimp genome, marked by a celebratory issue of the journal Nature, tells us that humans and chimps share 96 percent of the same genetic material. This number is hard to comprehend, what exactly does it means to say that we share 96% of our DNA with our closest living cousins?

Directly examining the DNA it self does not help. For example, consider the first 100 base pairs of the chimps mitochondrial DNA:

•  gtttatgtagcttaccccctcaaagcaatacactgaaaatgtttcgacgggtttacatcaccccataaacaaacaggtttggtcctagcctttctattag...

and the first 100 base pairs of the Humans mitochondrial DNA:

• gatcacaggtctatcaccctattaaccactcacgggagctctccatgcatttggtattttcgtctggggggtgtgcacgcgatagcattgcgagacgctg...

It is very difficult to gauge similarity, and the full genome for both human and chimp is actually about 3 billion base pairs long!  

We have built a simple tool to allow people to visualize and understand the similarity/dissimilarity of DNA sequences. While this work is currently unpublished and still ongoing, we have released a video relating to human and chimp DNA to coincide with the publication of the complete chimp genome.

The video is approximately 2 minutes long and completely self contained. Below is the Youtube version, you may prefer to view the much higher resolution standalone versions below.

• The Google video version is here.
• Play Quicktime version in browser:  Warning, best quality, but large file. May take some minutes before video plays. 
• Play AVI version in browser.
• Play MP4  version in browser. 
• Right click to download Quicktime Version:  Warning, large file   (free player).
• Right click to download AVI Version
• Right click to download MP4 Version

Brief bios of participants:

• Dr. Eamonn Keogh is an assistant professor of Computer Science at UCR. His research interests include data mining and visualization.
• Dr. Stefano Lonardi is an assistant professor of Computer Science at UCR. His research interests include computational molecular biology.
• Dr. Victor B. Zordan is an assistant professor of Computer Science at UCR. His research interests include computer graphics.
• Dr. Sang-Hee Lee is an assistant professor of Anthropology at UCR. Her research interests include human evolution and taxonomy.
• Manel Jara is a Computer Science student in Autonomous University of Barcelona, and was a visiting student at UCR in 2005.

Alexandra Seremina was kind enough to translate this page into Romanian

If you wish to reference this work, please use:

E. Keogh, S. Lonardi, V. B. Zordan, S.H. Lee and M. Jara.(2005). Visualizing the Similarity of Human and Chimp DNA. (Multimedia Video). http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/DNA/

Thanks to Colin Crenshaw, Bill Yuan-chi Chiu and Anwar Adi for help and suggestions. The music in the video is Chopin - Ballade No. 4 in f minor, Op.52, Andante con moto, performed by Dr. Sang-Hee Lee.