A unique feature of 8p is a region of about 15 megabases that appears to have a high mutation rate.

This region shows a significant divergence between human and chimpanzee, suggesting that its high mutation rates have contributed to the evolution of the human brain.

Because researchers use different approaches to genome annotation their predictions of the number of genes on each chromosome varies (for technical details, see gene prediction).

So CCDS's gene number prediction represents a lower bound on the total number of human protein-coding genes.

The following diseases and disorders are some of those related to genes on chromosome 8: