Do all Primates (except humans) have 48 Chromosomes? - what the hell happened to that extra chromosome during evolution? (Sep/28/2008 )
Humans have 46 Chromosomes and the rest of primates have 48.
in a way they have one chromosome more than us. does that extra chromosome carry different genes? what are they?
I know that scientists have compared the genome of Chimpanzees and Humans about 1-2 years ago when they sequenced the chimpanzees' genome by Roche's Genome 20 sequencer but I don't know how different they are.
Can NCBI help? it will be a huge sequence comparison, ....and I don't have the time to do that 
I just read n article that two chromosomes of primates have been fused to each other in humans. How did that happen? does it happen all the time in other species too?
You should read about the indian Muntjac, this species of Mutjac has 6 very large chromsomes. All other members in this genus have 48 chromsomes.
Yes do check pubmed, it should have a paper about this comparison somewhere. if I am not mistaken human and chimps share ~99% of all genes. However, if we do have a number of difference in the promoter and 5' untranslated region of the gene. In other words while the two species have nearly all the same genes, the regulations of said genes are a lot more variable.
you should read about the indian Muntjac, this species of Mutjac has 6 very large chromsomes. All other members in this genus have 48 chromsomes.
Well, it goes something like this, the tip of one chromosome breaks, causing it to fuse to another chromosome. THis produces a bicentric chromosome. One centromere become inactivated, leaving only one centromere working.. the one that is most aggressive at capturing microtubules of the spindle apparatus. Something like that.... the details are still being studied. Best to go look up pubmed for a more complete and uptodate version of this story.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tNjRJZgpaEY&...feature=related
see this video, Lloyd Pye is claiming that Annunakis fused two chromosomes into one.
I'm having a debate right now with one of his followers and he is claiming the fusion doesn't happen in other species. he is asking me to prove he is wrong, so I'll copy/paste your post about this Indian Muntjac for him.
"Hasn't happened" is a long way from "can't happen".
in a nutshell:
the telomere endings of two chromosomes can overlap (becaus telomeres of all chromosomes have the same repeating sequence)
and then be joined by a recombinase enzyme. this is actually very similar to homologuos recombination. the enzyme thinks (metaphorically)
that the two chromosomes are one broken chromosome and "fixes" it.
that is why the human chromosome 2 (the one we talk about) has telomere sequences in its center (which is quite odd since telomeres are by definition at the end of chromosomes only).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2_(human)
wow, thanks , i didn't know that
No - the great apes seem to have 48 chromosomes, but the diploid number for primates as a whole varies from 20-80. Have a look at this Link (google books) for a reference.
Yes do check pubmed, it should have a paper about this comparison somewhere. if I am not mistaken human and chimps share ~99% of all genes. However, if we do have a number of difference in the promoter and 5' untranslated region of the gene. In other words while the two species have nearly all the same genes, the regulations of said genes are a lot more variable.
And things get weirder still, because even the humble C. elegans has ~19,800 protein-coding genes, compared to the estimated human complement of ~22,000 protein-coding genes. But the big difference is in the regulatory genome. As organisms increase the number of protein-coding genes in a linear fashion, the number of regulatory genes increases quadratically. Things really get funky when you realise it's often the "junk DNA" sequences, like Alu repeat sequences, that do the really important regulatory work
Swanny, I never believed in Junk DNA, all these sequences can not be there just as non-coding DNA.
Bob1, thanks for the link