Illegally Traded Chimpanzees: Where Has This Unlawful Activity Started?

Researchers recently produced the first catalog of genomic diversity for endangered wild chimpanzees, including over 820 chimp samples from across their range.

This catalog provides a detailed restructuring of chimp population structure and "free-scale patterns of isolation, migration, and connection," a Phys.org report specified.

The researchers employ this information to develop a method to associate confiscated chimpanzees with their place of origin within approximately 100 kilometers, intending to support initiatives to fight the illegal trade of chimpanzees and related products.

The study's first author Claudia Fontsere, from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, a joint center of CSIC and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, said their efforts to describe the present genomic diversity of this species are an attempt to offer a "fine-scale map of connectivity" between populations that can be of service to conservationists as a baseline and guide to developing upon their conservation initiatives.

The initiative would not have been possible if not for the coordinated sampling of thousands of chimp fecal samples by the PanAF or Pan African Program at 48 sites, together with years of an initiative to develop methodological techniques to effectively retrieve and enrich the part of the host DNA in fecal samples, according to researchers.

Fecal specimens come with many technical challenges as they have only small amounts of degraded chimpanzee DNA, although they also have benefits for the study of endangered species as they enable comprehensive collection without interference to the animals.

Sequencing of a whole Chromosome

Such techniques can now be put to work to examine many other endangered primates, as well as species. Tomas Marques-Bonet, the principal investigator from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and co-lead of the study, said since they are using sequencing of a whole chromosome with thousands of independent markers, compared to few microsatellite markers, there's a much broader view of the genome that's needed to refine and describe the very complex evolutionary history of chimpanzees."

In their study published in the Cell Genomics journal, impressively, they are doing it with non-invasive samples, which, in a sense, a sense, are the best of all worlds, a valuable source of DNA but collected in a manner that animals never need to be contacted or interrupted beyond researchers that exist in their habitat. Since the fossil record and the ancient DNA of chimps are limited, the only way to restructure their past is through investigations of living individuals.

Chromosome 21

Scientists have identified four chimp subspecies, although questions remain about their relationships. A SciTechDaily report said there had been long-standing questions about how associated such subspecies are and have been with each other.

To explore the questions in this new research, Fontsere and colleagues retrieved partial genome information from over 800 non-invasively collected wild chimpanzee fecal specimens across their present range.

They concentrated their attention on chromosome 21, the tiniest contagious nuclear sequence in the chimpanzee genome, as well as a source of a wealth of genomic sequence data for utilization in inferring chimpanzee population construction.

Just by their sampling method, explained Fontsere, they have found roughly 50 percent more, and new, genetic variants on chromosome 21 compared to previous research.

The dataset has been key in understanding recent and past gene flow between populations where past sampling gaps impeded their research. Related information about the illegal trading of chimpanzees is shown on BBC News's YouTube video below:

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