dkysh t1_j50geul wrote
Reply to comment by VictoriousEgret in Given that reproduction is difficult or impossible when both animals have different numbers of chromosomes, how did so many species evolve to have so many different numbers of them? by MercurioLeCher
Building a "reference genome" for a species from scratch is a whole field of science.
When people do "normal sequencing", the genome is broken into an infinity of small pieces. The genome of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans fit so well the human genome, that scientists usually use the human reference genome to study great apes.
Some scientists compared both the human and the chimpanzee reference genomes built independently from scratch, and they found just minimal differences. All this shows that the human chr2 and the great ape chr2a and 2b are almost identical in they just happened to fuse in proto-humans sometime in the last 6 million years.
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