3 ms·

I read once that we share 99% of our DNA with Chimpanzees but we also share 95% of DNA with fruit flies. So if the viruses are 89% similar does that mean the d

by willyt 7y ago

I read once that we share 99% of our DNA with Chimpanzees but we also share 95% of DNA with fruit flies. So if the viruses are 89% similar does that mean the difference between SARs and nCOV is bigger than the difference between a human and fruit fly? Who knows what this analysis might be telling us.

est31 7y ago
We also have more genes overall, so in absolute terms the difference between us and chimpanzees or fruit flies is pretty large compared to the differences between those two viruses. Also we basically have all the ingredients to procreate ourselves (we only need to team up with someone from the other sex), while viruses partly rely on the protein synthesis machinery of the host. So viruses can do away with conserved proteins they will find in most of their hosts, we can't.
thanatosmin 7y ago
That's not unreasonable to say, but virus sequences drift much faster and have a much shorter lifecycle. This means a 1% difference can be huge for us and insignificant for them.
glofish 7y ago
the important thing to remember here is that there is identity and similarity. Depending on how we define similarity the percentages vary wildly. Can we find millions of similar regions in the fruitfly as in the human? Yes. Are those regions on the same chromosome and on the same relative orientations - not even close. If you start reading the genome from left to right, the human and fruitfly are not even remotely similar. If were to chop the DNA into 100bp pieces now you can find a lot of matches across the organisms, still many sequences will be very different. One basepair difference could lead to a completely different protein. Then the fruit fly genome is 300 million bases long, the human is 3 billion bases. You can see how there is a lot more to similarity than initially meets the eye.

3 ms·

I read once that we share 99% of our DNA with Chimpanzees but we also share 95% of DNA with fruit flies. So if the viruses are 89% similar does that mean the d

by willyt 7y ago

est31 7y ago
We also have more genes overall, so in absolute terms the difference between us and chimpanzees or fruit flies is pretty large compared to the differences between those two viruses. Also we basically have all the ingredients to procreate ourselves (we only need to team up with someone from the other sex), while viruses partly rely on the protein synthesis machinery of the host. So viruses can do away with conserved proteins they will find in most of their hosts, we can't.
thanatosmin 7y ago
That's not unreasonable to say, but virus sequences drift much faster and have a much shorter lifecycle. This means a 1% difference can be huge for us and insignificant for them.
glofish 7y ago
the important thing to remember here is that there is identity and similarity. Depending on how we define similarity the percentages vary wildly. Can we find millions of similar regions in the fruitfly as in the human? Yes. Are those regions on the same chromosome and on the same relative orientations - not even close. If you start reading the genome from left to right, the human and fruitfly are not even remotely similar. If were to chop the DNA into 100bp pieces now you can find a lot of matches across the organisms, still many sequences will be very different. One basepair difference could lead to a completely different protein. Then the fruit fly genome is 300 million bases long, the human is 3 billion bases. You can see how there is a lot more to similarity than initially meets the eye.