dkysh

dkysh t1_jdr6zli wrote

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dkysh t1_j50ssc6 wrote

If we were bacteria, yeah, sure. But we are extremely complicated multicellular organisms. A whole genome trisomy screws up the balance of gene expression to such an extreme that most trisomies are simply lethal and never observed (they end up in miscarriage).

A gene fusion is a less drastic event, where 2 chromosomes happen to be connected, but the genetic load is identical.

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dkysh t1_j50geul wrote

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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dkysh t1_j506qis wrote

Another (close) example: Human's chromosome 2 is the result of the fusion of other 2 smaller chromosomes present in all other great apes, chromosomes 2a and 2b.

The content of chr2a+2b is almost identical to human's chr2, even with genes following the same order. This makes them much more compatible and probable to recombine and produce viable offspring.

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dkysh t1_j0aragh wrote

The sperm cells themselves are very short-lived. However, they do originate from spermatogonial stem cells that keep on replicating theough all your life.

In a cartoon, these stem cells divide into two cells. One of these daughter cells (cell A) keeps being a stem cell and the other not (cell B), begining a chain of divisions into further daughter cells that end up being a bunch of sperm.

New mutations appearing on cell B will only be found in one "round" of sperm. Mutations appearing in cell A are there to stay in all future rounds.

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dkysh t1_iuy6std wrote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranthropus_boisei#Postcranium

> Unlike P. robustus, the arm bones of OH 80 are heavily built, and the elbow joint shows similarities to that of modern gibbons and orangutans. This could either indicate that P. boisei used a combination of terrestrial walking as well as suspensory behaviour, or was completely bipedal but retained an ape-like upper body condition from some ancestor species due to a lack of selective pressure to lose them.

Although this "suspensory behaviour" doesn't need to be brachiation, Gibbons have exceptional upper body strength as an adaptation to brachiation as a locomotion mode: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-7580.2009.01109.x

So, no idea, but could be possible. Depends on your definition of strength.

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