Again, from GenomeWeb, sequence of the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) : Newly Sequenced Macaque Genome May Hint at Human Mental Disorders.

Researchers have sequenced the genome of the rhesus macaque, the third primate genome to be sequenced, the American Association for the Advancement of Science said today.
In findings detailed in a special issue of the Science dedicated to the macaque project, researchers said the rhesus macaque, also known as Macaca mulatta, is 97.5-percent similar to humans.
That makes it valuable both for its proximity to humans – for which researchers found a link to a mental disorder – and for its relative distance with the chimpanzee, which shares 99 percent of its genes with humans….

The sequence was generated in collaboration with the Michael Smith Genome Science Centre here in Vancouver.  The project site at Baylor is here, along with some of the other sequencing projects underway.  More information below the fold…

The macaque genome, which can be found here, is approximately 2.87 Gb
long and includes around 14.9 Gb of raw sequence. There are around 24
million bases in the scaffold sequence, the authors said. Comparative
research into the changes that have taken place in the time since the
macaque, an old-world monkey, diverged from humans and chimps 25
million years ago could offer researchers insights into disease
research in particular, according to the scientists. Richard Gibbs,
director of the Baylor College of Medicine’s Human Genome Sequencing
Center and leader of the project, said the macaque genome “helps
illuminate what makes humans different from other apes.” This
information “allows us to learn what has been added or deleted in
primate evolution from the rhesus macague to the chimpanzee to the
human,” Gibbs added. The project was performed by more than 100
researchers working with $20 million in funding from the National Human
Genome Research Institute. The Genome Sequencing Center at Washington
University and the J. Craig Venter Institute contributed significantly
to the sequencing project, according to the AAAS. According to the
study, researchers identified around 200 genes that “show evidence of
positive selection during evolution, making them potential candidates
for determining the differences among primate species.” The study said
those genes are involved in hair formation, immune response, membrane
proteins, and sperm-egg fusion. Other finding with potential medical
implications are examples of normal macaque proteins that looked like
diseased human proteins, including one diseased protein involved in
mental retardation and brain damage.