Humans left the chimpanzee lineage seven million years ago.
Are humans still evolving? Seven million years after we left the chimpanzee lineage, a study found 155 new genes in humans, suggesting that we are still evolving. The study has been conducted by researchers from Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Centre (BSRC Fleming) in Greece and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. They said that the newly-discovered genes emerged from small, non-coding section of the DNA. According to Science Alert, these genes appear to play crucial role inhuman biology, making the discovery extremely important.
The study has been published in the journal Cell Reports.
"This project started back in 2017 because I was interested in novel gene evolution and figuring out how these genes originate," said Nikolaos Vakirlis, a scientist at BSRC Fleming and an author of the study.
"It was put on ice for a few years, until another study got published that had some very interesting data, allowing us to get started on this work," the researcher added.
Taking the data from the previous study (published in 2020), the team behind in this new study created a genetic tree comparing humans to other vertebrate species.
The scientists found that some of the newly-discovered genes can be tracked all the way back to the earliest days of mammals, while others are more recent additions. Two of the genes identified by the study seem to have emerged since the human-chimpanzee split, the researchers found.
"We sought to identify and examine cases in the human lineage of small proteins that evolved out of previously noncoding sequences and acquired function either immediately or shortly thereafter," the team wrote in their published paper.