

Sudmant works in a lab that studies both primate evolutionary biology and neuropsychiatric diseases such as autism, schizophrenia, developmental delay, and cognitive and behavioral disorders. The ebola virus is responsible for thousands of gorilla and chimpanzee deaths in Africa and the origin of HIV, the virus which causes AIDs, is SIV, simian immunodeficiency virus. Such questions are important to both conservation efforts and to human health. Sudmant added that learning more about great ape genetic diversity also contributes to knowledge about disease susceptibility among various primate species.
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Sudmant, a UW graduate student in genome sciences, said, "Gathering this data is critical to understanding differences between great ape species, and separating aspects of the genetic code that distinguish humans from other primates." Analysis of great ape genetic diversity is likely to reveal ways that natural selection, population growth and collapse, geographic isolation and migration, climate and geological changes, and other factors shaped primate evolution. Conservationists in many countries, some of them in dangerous or isolated locations, helped in this recent effort, and the research team credits them for the success of the project.

Genetic variation among great apes had been largeley uncharted, due to the difficuty in obtaining genetic specimens from wild apes. "The research provided us the deepest survey to date of great ape genetic diversity with evolutionary insights into the divergence and emergence of great-ape species," noted Eichler, a UW professor of genome sciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. The report appears today, July 3, in the journal Nature. Sudmant, with Evan Eichler at the University of Washington in Seattle, led the project. Javier Prado-Martinez, working with Tomas Marques-Bonet at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and Peter H. Nine human genomes were included in the sampling. They represent all six great ape species: chimpanzee, bonobo, Sumatran orangutan, Bornean orangutan, eastern gorilla, and western lowland gorilla, and seven subspecies. More than 75 scientists and wildlife conservationists from around the world assisted the genetic analysis of 79 wild and captive-born great apes.
