Sequencing the chimpanzee genome: insights into human evolution and disease

This review, published in 2003 amidst growing hype surrounding the Chimpanzee Genome Project, explores the practical implications of chimpanzee-human genome comparison, focusing on biomedical applications. It addresses the use of such comparison to test the "less-is-more" hypothesis, which emphasizes the importance of loss of function mutations in the human lineage, and the hypothesis that phenotypic differences between humans and chimpanzees are caused by changes in gene regulation rather than in the protein repertoire.