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Updated: Aug 19, 2026

Quantitative Analysis of Chromatin Proteomes in Disease
Published on: December 28, 2012
Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees
Galina Glazko1, Vamsi Veeramachaneni, Masatoshi Nei
1Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Abstract:
The chimpanzee is our closest living relative. The morphological differences between the two species are so large that there is no problem in distinguishing between them. However, the nucleotide difference between the two species is surprisingly small. The early genome comparison by DNA hybridization techniques suggested a nucleotide difference of 1-2%. Recently, direct nucleotide sequencing confirmed this estimate. These findings generated the common belief that the human is extremely close to the chimpanzee at the genetic level. However, if one looks at proteins, which are mainly responsible for phenotypic differences, the picture is quite different, and about 80% of proteins are different between the two species. Still, the number of proteins responsible for the phenotypic differences may be smaller since not all genes are directly responsible for phenotypic characters.
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