Aligning Humans and Mammals

Ben Fry
Sequences of human DNA aligned with about a dozen other mammals, created as an illustration for Seed Magazine. The data is from the Mammalian Genome Project at the Broad Institute. This is real alignment data, based on a more "functional" tool that browses this data. The upper image is the final, and the lower image is an alternate.
In each block, the top (white) row is human DNA, additional rows are ordered roughly in their "evolutionary distance" from humans. First row after human is chimp, then rhesus macaque (rhesus monkey), elephant, dog, armadillo, cavia (basically a guinea pig), cow, and so on, down to monodelphis (opossum). Letters are colored when they differ from human, with Ts and As in red, Cs and Gs in blue.