The Semple Lab

James’ impressive analysis of human evolutionary divergence patterns finally appears online as an epub at Genome Research (Prendergast and Semple, 2011). For the first time these data suggest that selection has acted relatively recently (since divergence from chimpanzee) across many regions of the human genome to alter the physical landscape, the chromatin structure, present. This also implies that the chromatin structures seen at many locations, often far away from known genes, affect critical cellular functions and have played important roles in the origin of our species.