The question of difference between chimpanzee and human genomes, which are near identical at the DNA level will be answered very soon. In what is seen as the basis which will help in further research, scientists have found areas linked to cell differentiation and immune response.

Study co-author, Richard Redon, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute said, "By looking at all the variations, we will get a catalogue, and when we find a variation in a person with a disease, it will help us understand the function of that variation.........It will help us understand better how our species emerged."

While it was known by researches that humans and chimpanzees share about 98 percent of the same genes, Redon's team looked at a relatively unstudied phenomenon known as ‘copy number variation’or CNV, in which genes are randomly duplicated. Mutations are more likely to accumulate in a given type of gene when multiple copies exist, and the simultaneous application of multiple genes can provide a functional boost. Redon's team is the first to assemble maps of CNV similarities across both chimpanzees and humans, and then compare the maps to each other.

According to Redon, "It's just a start".

Melanie Babcock, an Albert Einstein College of Medicine geneticist, who has studied copy number variations in primates, called the work "fascinating.”

The study that also included scientists from Arizona State University, Brigham & Women's Hospital, the University of Washington, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Harvard Medical School appeared in the journal Genome Research.