Scientists have decoded the DNA of the western lowland gorilla, a feat that could boost conservation efforts for the endangered apes as well as broaden researchers' understanding of human origins.

The complete sequence of 20,962 genes extracted from the skin cells of Kamilah, a 34-year-old gorilla who lives at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park was compiled by an international team of more than 60 researchers who worked on the project for about five years.

"The gorilla genome is important because gorillas are our second-closest living relatives," said Richard Durbin, senior author of a paper about the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

By comparing the new gorilla DNA sequence with reference genomes of humans, chimpanzees, orangutans and macaques, scientists have already made a few surprising insights into the crucial periods when we diverged into separate species.

For instance, the new genetic data bolster fossil evidence that gorillas split off as a separate species about 10 million years ago and that humans and chimps parted ways about 6 million years ago. Previous genetic evidence had seemed to point to a more recent split, prompting a contentious debate between genetics experts and fossil scholars, said Durbin, who leads the genome informatics group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England.

"We're proposing a way to make a consistent story between the genetic evidence and the fossil evidence," Durbin said.

"That's significant," said University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved in the research. "There's an argument about early hominids are they really our ancestors? This helps settle that. It shows it's possible."

The data also show that humans and gorillas differ in only 1.75% of their DNA, much less than previously believed. Humans and chimps, our closest living relatives, differ in only 1.37% of their genomes.

When Durbin and his colleagues matched up the DNA letters of gorillas, chimps and humans, they found that in 15% of cases, gorilla DNA was more like human DNA than was chimp DNA.

This result "tells us that there are individual genes for which, if you want to find the closest sequence to humans, you won't necessarily look at chimpanzees. In a few cases, you'll look at gorillas," said Jeffrey Rogers, a geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and coauthor of an editorial on the research, also published in Nature.

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Gorilla DNA offers clues about humans too