This kind of relationship has eliminated harmful genetic variations for this species, according to a study published in Science.
The investigation has conducted an international team that have played an important role scientists at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) of Barcelona, a joint center between the CSIC and the University Pompeu Fabra (UPF), and the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG).
The first project to sequence the entire genome of mountain gorillas has given scientists and conservationists new more optimistic about the impact of the decline of these endangered apes living in Central Africa vision.
The investigator IBE and CNAG and professor of Experimental Sciences Tomas Marques-Bonet UPF told Efe that the investigation has revealed “a bad thing and another good”.
“The bad news is that the mountain gorillas have a high level of inbreeding because they are so inbred and that’s not good ‘per se’ but the good is that they are inbred for hundreds of years and have adapted genetically to it and survived the strongest and the weakest removed, what is good for the preservation of the species, “said Marques-Bonet.
“Three years after the first gorilla genome sequencing and by sequencing genomes over 30 more, including the famous ‘Snowflake’, have now received blood of mountain gorillas and we have its genome sequenced and compared with other apes, and begin to understand their similarities and differences, and genetic impact of inbreeding, “he said.
Researchers interested in how inbreeding affected gorillas mountain, were surprised to find that many harmful genetic variations have disappeared from the population precisely through inbreeding.
Although scientists are concerned about the high level of inbreeding, which can make gorillas mountain more vulnerable to environmental changes and endemic diseases, including human virus infections, inbreeding was somehow genetically beneficial to this species.
“We observed genetic drift and create genomes mechanisms to eliminate deleterious mutations due to the small size of its population, “said Javier Prado Martinez, co-first author of the study and researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology.
Using blood samples collected for years by ‘Gorilla Doctors’ which is wild gorillas injured by traps, the researchers were able to sequence the entire genomes seven mountain gorillas.
Comparing these with genomes lowland gorillas East, its nearest neighbors have observed that there is less harmful variants in mountain gorillas, which can cause serious health problems, often fatal.
By analyzing each genome, researchers have also determined how it has changed the size of the population of mountain gorillas in the last million years.
According to his calculations, the average population was a few hundred for thousands of years, much longer than previously thought.
The number of mountain gorillas living in the volcanic Virunga mountain range on the border of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fell to 253 copies in 1981 as a result of habitat destruction and game.
Since then, conservation efforts led by Rwanda Development Board and conservation organizations and support of tourists who want to visit the famous gorillas by primatologist Dian Fossey have increased to approximately 480 there are today.
Scientists believe catastrophic decline of mountain gorillas in the 1980s, but genetic analyzes suggest that have faced small population sizes for thousands of years, so now believe they can remain in these conditions for thousands of years.
Genomic data collected also help identify the source of gorillas that have been captured or killed illegally and make it easier to carry court poachers.
In the study, besides the IBE (CSIC-UPF) and CNAG, participated the universities of Cambridge, Cardiff, Copenhagen and Bologna and the Copenhagen Zoo, Rwanda Development Board Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Gorilla Doctors.
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