The sequence of the gorilla fetal globin genes: evidence for multiple gene conversions in human evolution.

have been sequenced and compared to three human loci (a Gy-gene and two ?-alleles). A comparison of regions of local homology among these five sequences indicates that long after the duplication that produced the two nonallelic y-globin loci of catarrhine primates, about 35 million years (Myr) ago, at least one gene conversion event occurred between these loci. This conversion occurred not long before the ancestral divergence (about 6 Myr ago) of