L & S C30Y Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Denisova Cave, Agoo, Gene Flow
Document Summary
7 billion people with great physical variety : variation in humans, demonstrated by some members of the. University of california faculty: yet relatively little genetic variety! 200,000 chimpanzees outside of zoos: humans are much more similar to each other than chimps. Where did we come from: a family tree, maternal family tree, hominid evolution. Rna only exists to convert dna to proteins. Was it the horse or the zebra: answer: much more similar to a horse than to a zebra, not a great discovery, but cool, one of the very first uses of the polymerase chain reaction. Special value of mitochondrial dna: the mitochondrion separate organelle, has its own genome, mitochondria are inherited through the egg, not the sperm. Human mitochondrial chromosome vs. nuclear chromosome and genes: nuclear, 16,000 base pairs, 100 copies per cell immune from mitosis and meiosis, human, 6 billion base pairs, 2 copies per cell, follows rule of mitosis and meiosis.