In Answers Research Journal 11 (2018): 205-209

In a previous 2016 study aligning Sanger-style chimpanzee genomic trace reads (mean length = 704 bases) to the human genome, it was determined that chimpanzee DNA was not more than 85% similar to human. To further investigate the issue of human-chimpanzee genome similarity using higher quality DNA sequence, 18,000 de novo assembled contigs (constructed with Sanger style reads, Illumina short reads, and PacBio long reads) downloaded from NCBI having an average length of 30,913 bases were queried against the human genome using the BLASTN algorithm with gap extension. The alignments averaged 10,508 bases in length with a nucleotide identity of 84%. The contigs were also queried against the panTro4 and panTro5 versions of the chimpanzee genome yielding alignment identities of 92% and 100%, respectively. Results from this study not only negate the concept of the 98.5% DNA similarity myth, but highlight the extremely flawed and humanized nature of the panTro4 version of the chimpanzee genome and its predecessors that are widely used to support the human evolution paradigm.

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