Gibbon-human genomes compared.

This could be the image of the week or the year, if this blog had such a section. A comparison between two very different representatives of the Hominoidea superfamily, also known as apes or primates without tail.

It comes from the paper Evolutionary Breakpoints in the Gibbon Suggest Association between Cytosine Methylation and Karyotype Evolution, by Lucia Carbone et al. And represents the traslocations of genes in gibbons relative to humans. In their own words:

The lines in the inner circle represent inter-chromosomal (red) and intra-chromosomal (blue) rearrangements in gibbon relative to human. The outer circles provide genomic context. The outermost circle displays human chromosomes along with genomic coordinates and G-banding stains (NCBI Build 36.1). Purple lines represent human segmental duplications from the UCSC Segmental Dups Track. (http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTrackUi?g=genomicSuperDups). Orange lines represent gibbon segmental duplications we predicted based on read coverage. Green lines represent human genes from the UCSC RefSeq Genes Track (http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTrackUi?g=refGene.

They suspect that hypomethilation, an epigenetic phenomenon, may have been the responsible of so many translocations.
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