Researchers have now found that African mountain gorillas, who are among the closest relatives of man, are severely inbred. They also believe that these animals resorted to the widely discouraged practice of inbreeding when faced with the threat of extinction. Due to their close relation to us in the evolution chain, they are amongst the most intensively studied primates in the wild.
Hunting and destruction of their natural habitat had put these animals at a huge risk. There were only 253 of them left in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1981. Efforts at preserving them and increasing their numbers have helped them increase in number dramatically.
The researchers in this case based their findings upon the blood samples taken from seven gorillas living in the forests of the Virunga volcanic mountain range.
“Mountain gorillas are among the most intensively studied primates in the wild, but this is the first in depth, whole genome analysis,” co-author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute – Chris Tyler-Smith, said in the study published in the US journal Science.
“3 years on from sequencing the gorilla reference genome, we can now compare the genomes of all gorilla populations, including the critically endangered mountain gorilla, and to understand their similarities and differences and the genetic impact of inbreeding,” he added.
A co-author of the study, Aylwyn Scally, who is a genetics professor at the University of Cambridge, asserts that knowing this hitherto unknown aspect about gorillas “provides us with valuable insight into how apes and humans, their closely related cousins, adapt genetically to living in small populations.”
The findings which were based on one of the most exhaustive genetic reviews of these animals till date were then analyzed by a multi-institutional team consisting of 23 authors from six countries. Though worried by the inbreeding among them, authors in this case believe they have become more resilient due to lowering of hurtful hereditary transformations.
