2007.01.18 | Marianne Dammand Iversen

The chimpanzee is our closest relative in theanimal kingdom. Until recently, the time where humans and chimpanzees split to eventually become separate species was dated to five-seven million years ago. A recent study,conducted by people from BiRC, is now moving this time toonly about four million years ago. The study reanalyses DNA data using new sophisticated computational methods basedon so-called hidden Markov models (HMM) and through this estimates a more recent speciation time and with more accuracy than previous estimates.

In this talk I will give a short introduction to the biology and genetics necessary to understand the underlying problem, and then describe how we used computational methods to date the split between humans, chimpanzee and gorilla.

For more information, refer to: genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/