Fabrizio Mafessoni: Bonobos' sexual behavior and parental care influence the accumulation of deleterious alleles on the X-chromosome

  • Datum: 13.10.2016
  • Uhrzeit: 16:00 - 17:00
  • Vortragende(r): Fabrizio Mafessoni vom MPI für Evolutionäre Anthropologie in Leipzig
  • Mehr Informationen über die Forschungsgruppe unter http://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/genomes/overview.html?Fsize=-1%2527A%253D0
  • Ort: MPI Plön
  • Raum: Hörsaal
  • Gastgeber: Chaitanya Gokhale

Abstract (auf Englisch):

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) are sister species which differ substantially in behavior. Bonobo societies are described as peaceful and egalitarian: males and females are co-dominant and male competition for mates is moderate, with mothers facilitating their sons’ access to fertile females. In contrast, chimpanzee communities are highly hierarchical and male-dominated, and characterized by intense male competition for mates. These differences in mating behavior can affect their genomic evolution, in particular the evolution of the X chromosome because males carry only one copy of this chromosome while females carry two. We analyzed the exomes of 20 individuals per species and show that the X chromosomes of bonobos, as compared with the autosomes, accumulate a higher proportion of putatively deleterious alleles than those of chimpanzees. This observation is consistent with reduced efficacy of natural selection on bonobo X chromosomes, as we validated with computational simulations implementing directly differences in behavior between the two species.


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