Fabrizio Mafessoni: Bonobos' sexual behavior and parental care influence the accumulation of deleterious alleles on the X-chromosome
- Date: Oct 13, 2016
- Time: 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Fabrizio Mafessoni from the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig
- For more information on the research group, please check http://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/genomes/overview.html?Fsize=-1%2527A%253D0
- Location: MPI Plön
- Room: Lecture hall
- Host: Chaitanya Gokhale
Abstract:
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.