Gorilla Genetics and Their Implications for Their Demographics

Inference of Gorilla demographic and selective history from whole genome sequence data

Authors:

McMannus et al

Abstract:

While population-level genomic sequence data have been gathered extensively for humans, similar data from our closest living relatives are just beginning to emerge. Examination of genomic variation within great apes offers many opportunities to increase our understanding of the forces that have differentially shaped the evolutionary history of hominid taxa. Here, we expand upon the work of the Great Ape Genome Project by analyzing medium to high coverage whole genome sequences from 14 western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), 2 eastern lowland gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri), and a single Cross River individual (Gorilla gorilla diehli). We infer that the ancestors of western and eastern lowland gorillas diverged from a common ancestor ~261 thousand years ago (kya), and that the ancestors of the Cross River population diverged from the western lowland gorilla lineage ~68 kya. Using a diffusion approximation approach to model the genome-wide site frequency spectrum, we infer a history of western lowland gorillas that includes an ancestral population expansion of ~1.4-fold around ~970 kya and a recent ~5.6-fold contraction in population size ~23 kya. The latter may correspond to a major reduction in African equatorial forests around the Last Glacial Maximum. We also analyze patterns of variation among western lowland gorillas to identify several genomic regions with strong signatures of recent selective sweeps. We find that processes related to taste, pancreatic and saliva secretion, sodium ion transmembrane transport, and cardiac muscle function are overrepresented in genomic regions predicted to have experienced recent positive selection.