According to research, people and bananas share 50% of the same genes.

Humans and bananas share 50% of the same genes, which is a fun factoid that can be heard during a party conversation, or even in a "Dude Perfect" video.Huh?There is a lot of difference between a person and a piece of yellow fruit, starting with the fact that one is an animal and the other a plant.There is some truth to it, but it's not the whole truth.

The piece of info may have come from a program run by the National Human Genome Research Institute.This particular effort was led by a genetics expert, but he says the experiment was not published as most scientific research is.It was created to be part of an educational video called "The Animated Genome."The video said that the genes between a human and a banana are similar.

In order to find out how this similarity was determined, we talked to Dr.It's funny how the banana/human comparison has gotten legs.

It's important to understand the difference between the two products.All of the information is in there, so it's easy to think of genes as the blueprints of a house.Think of human and banana DNA as blueprints of a ranch home and colonial-style home, respectively.Plumbing, bathroom, kitchen, and many other things are the same in each house, but the end products are vastly different.That's how it works with humans compared to everything else.

The second thing to keep in mind is that genes, which are the regions of the DNA that code for these proteins, only make up 2 percent of your DNA.

Scientists looked at the genes in a typical banana genome for this particular experiment."We placed the sequence of the genes in a file so that we could predict their amino acid sequence in the future," he says.The same process was used for all human genes.

The scientists compared the banana and human genes.He says that the program compares how similar the banana genes are to the human genes.The matches that were kept were more similar than one would expect.The program continued to do this.

More than 4 million comparisons were done, resulting in about 7,000 best "hits" between the two genomes.The percent similarity score for each hit was averaged.He says the result was about 40 percent.The average similarity is between genes and proteins.Gene products are the biochemical material when a gene becomes functional.There are many genes in our genome that don't have the same counterpart in the banana genome.

This is a simpler breakdown if that is difficult to chew and swallow.They took all of the banana genes and compared them to human genes.If the human didn't have the banana's genes, they culled a degree of similarity.The majority of our genes are similar to the banana genome.Forty percent of those 60 percent are the same as the one in the banana.

It may seem odd that many genes are similar in two different things.It's not.There's a lot of the same things we do, like consuming oxygen, if you think about it.A lot of the genes are fundamental to life.

The research looked at the similarity of genes, not the percentage of similarity."It's a small mistake," Dr. Brody says.We have something in common with a banana, a potato, and a pine tree.That part is correct.It's easy to see how the genes would get translated wrong.

It wouldn't align if a scientist looked at the genomes of a banana and a human and compared them.You share 50 percent of your genes with your parents.About 50 percent of our genes are shared with bananas, but only about 1 percent, according to Mike Francis, a PhD student at the University of Georgia.

We said earlier that genes make up 2 percent of your genes.What is the other 98 percent made up of?As to whether a gene should be turned on or off, eight percent of the rest of your DNA regulates it.The other 90 percent have functions that have been lost through evolution."These unknown sections of DNA used to be called 'junk DNA' because it was thought to do nothing."Francis doesn't use the phrase "junk DNA" because he thinks more of it is functional.

Humans share a high percentage of their genes with bananas, as well as with a mouse and fruit fly.Despite being very far apart in evolutionary time, we can still find a common signature in the genomes of common ancestors.The genes that helped cells live and reproduce are contained in the genomes of organisms that lived billions of years ago.We and plants have the same genes.

Francis says that humans share about 1 percent of their genes with other fruits.He says that all life on earth has evolved from a single cell.We are all related in a way.