| Literature DB >> 25859046 |
Yali Xue1, Javier Prado-Martinez2, Peter H Sudmant3, Vagheesh Narasimhan1,4, Qasim Ayub1, Michal Szpak1, Peter Frandsen5, Yuan Chen1, Bryndis Yngvadottir1, David N Cooper6, Marc de Manuel2, Jessica Hernandez-Rodriguez2, Irene Lobon2, Hans R Siegismund5, Luca Pagani1,7, Michael A Quail1, Christina Hvilsom8, Antoine Mudakikwa9, Evan E Eichler3,10, Michael R Cranfield11, Tomas Marques-Bonet2,12, Chris Tyler-Smith1, Aylwyn Scally13.
Abstract
Mountain gorillas are an endangered great ape subspecies and a prominent focus for conservation, yet we know little about their genomic diversity and evolutionary past. We sequenced whole genomes from multiple wild individuals and compared the genomes of all four Gorilla subspecies. We found that the two eastern subspecies have experienced a prolonged population decline over the past 100,000 years, resulting in very low genetic diversity and an increased overall burden of deleterious variation. A further recent decline in the mountain gorilla population has led to extensive inbreeding, such that individuals are typically homozygous at 34% of their sequence, leading to the purging of severely deleterious recessive mutations from the population. We discuss the causes of their decline and the consequences for their future survival.Entities:
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Year: 2015 PMID： 25859046 PMCID： PMC4668944 DOI： 10.1126/science.aaa3952
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Science ISSN： 0036-8075 Impact factor: 47.728