Visualization of chimp and human mitochondrial DNA

The recent publication of the complete chimp genome, marked by a celebratory issue of the journal Nature, tells us that humans and chimps share 96 percent of the same genetic material. This number is hard to comprehend, what exactly does it means to say that we share 96% of our DNA with our closest living cousins? Directly examining the DNA it self does not help. For example, consider the first 100 base pairs of the chimps mitochondrial DNA: gtttatgtagcttaccccctcaaagcaatacactgaaaatgtttcgacgggtttacatcaccccataaacaaacaggtttggtcctagcctttctattag... and the first 100 base pairs of the Humans mitochondrial DNA: gatcacaggtctatcaccctattaaccactcacgggagctctccatgcatttggtattttcgtctggggggtgtgcacgcgatagcattgcgagacgctg... It is very difficult to gauge similarity, and the full genome for both human and chimp is actually about 3 billion base pairs long! We have built a simple tool to allow people to visualize and understand the similarity/dissimilarity of DNA sequences. While this work is currently unpublished and still ongoing, we have released a video relating to human and chimp DNA to coincide with the publication of the complete chimp genome. High res version available at www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/DNA/