- #1
Goodies
- 10
- 1
When I see something like "Humans and Bananas share 50% the same DNA with one another!", I have several questions.
First of all, a banana has 530 million base pairs whereas a human has approximately 3 billion. Even if we took the first 530 billion base pairs of the human genome, this would only be about 17% of the size of the human genome. Obviously this is not at all how the gene similarities are measured. I would assume that it is talking about the similarities of protein-coding genes but if someone would be able to elaborate on the comparison techniques of DNA I'd be very appreciative!
First of all, a banana has 530 million base pairs whereas a human has approximately 3 billion. Even if we took the first 530 billion base pairs of the human genome, this would only be about 17% of the size of the human genome. Obviously this is not at all how the gene similarities are measured. I would assume that it is talking about the similarities of protein-coding genes but if someone would be able to elaborate on the comparison techniques of DNA I'd be very appreciative!