Chromosome 8

Chromosome 8 is one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in humans. People normally have two copies of this chromosome. Chromosome 8 spans about 146 million base pairs (the building material of DNA) and represents between 4.5 and 5.0% of the total DNA in cells. About 8% of its genes are involved in brain development and function, and about 16% are involved in cancer. A unique feature of 8p is a region of about 15 megabases that appears to have a high mutation rate. This region shows a significant divergence between human and chimpanzee, suggesting that its high mutation rates have contributed to the evolution of the human brain. TOC The following are some of the gene count estimates of human chromosome 8. Because researchers use different approaches to genome annotation their predictions of the number of genes on each chromosome varies (for technical details, see gene prediction). Among various projects, the collaborative consensus coding sequence project (CCDS) takes an extremely conservative strategy. So CCDS's gene number prediction represents a lower bound on the total number of human protein-coding genes. Genes on human chromosome 8 The following is a partial list of genes on human chromosome 8. For complete list, see the link in the infobox on the right. The following diseases and disorders are some of those related to genes on chromosome 8: 8p23.