How did humans evolve brains capable of complex language, civilization, and more?   

The answer could lie in exceptional DNA. Scientists at UC San Francisco found that parts of our chromosomes have evolved at breakneck speeds to give us an edge in brain development compared to apes. But it might also put us at risk for uniquely human brain disorders.  

A new resource from the Gene Ontology Consortium, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the known functions of all protein-coding human genes, has just been completed and released on a new website. For the first time, researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and other institutions used large-scale evolutionary modeling to integrate data on human genes with genetic data collected from other organisms. This has culminated in a searchable public resource that lists the known functions of more than 20,000 genes using the most accurate and complete evidence available. A paper describing the resource was just published in the journal Nature. The new resource of gene function descriptions, called the “PAN-GO functionome,” will essentially be used in the same way by the scientific community—to analyze omics data among other applications—but it will yield more accurate results. That’s because the recent work has brought together all the information in the knowledge base using large-scale evolutionary models (which track the evolutionary history of thousands of genes and related proteins), creating a more complete and accurate picture of gene function.