Question: Do we share 99% with every other human being?

Tristan Smith answered on 6 Mar 2015:

99% is an extremely high number and I doubt that there is enough statistics available currently to give a clear answer. Remember the genome (all the DNA in a cell) is made up of multiple parts. The bits that make protein (called coding regions, because they contain the code to make proteins, also called genes) are one of the most important as they are the bits that go off and do things, they do not change very much at all. Human coding sequences are almost 99.9% the same, remember even one change can lead to a disease! These protein coding regions do not change very often, even chimps match around 94% to human coding regions. However, there are all the bits in between genes that do different things and they are “less important”. By less important I mean one change won’t kill you!! These are much more flexible and different people will have lots of little changes, it is all these little changes that allows DNA testing for example. So, the human genome is around 85% genes, and they have 99.9% the same (in healthy people), the rest however is less, but until more whole genomes are sequenced we won’t know.