Chimps are amazingly adaptable. Unlike other nonhuman primates, they live in a variety of habitats and have developed different behaviors to thrive in them.
A recent study now shows that chimps also adjust genetically to environmentally specific challenges. Perhaps most notably, forest chimps have shown changes in the same genes known to help fight malaria in humans, according to a study in the journal Science. The study has implications for both chimp conservation and human health.
“The fact that we find potential evidence of parallel adaptations in chimpanzees and humans suggest that studying chimpanzee evolution (and primate evolution more generally) will help us learn not only about our closest living relatives but about our own evolution,” says Aida Andrés, a genetics professor at University College London and an author of the paper.
Learning About Chimp Resilience
In terms of conservation, understanding genetic resilience could help predict how chimps respond to a warming world.
“Because many habitats are predicted to become drier, hotter and more seasonal due to climate change, this ecological diversity and adaptive response are particularly important not only for chimpanzees, but potentially also for other species living in the same territories and, more globally, other species in similarly changing habitats,” says Andrés.
In terms of health, comparing how the two species respond to pathogens like malaria could improve our understanding of infectious disease in both humans and chimps, since we share about 98 percent of the same DNA.
“The fact that we observe signatures of genetic adaptation in chimpanzees in the same genes that are known to confer some resistance to malaria in humans suggests that the two species may adapt very similarly, albeit independently, to the same infection,” says Andrés.
Read More: Chimpanzees: Understanding Our Closest Relatives in the Animal Kingdom
Capturing Genetic Differences
However, we need to better understand how chimps genetically respond to diseases like malaria before strategies for humans based on chimp resistance can be developed. We also need to understand the sometimes subtle, but important, genetic differences between the similar chimp and human genes that appear to help both resist the disease.
Andrés emphasizes that we don’t know for certain that the genes they identified in chimps do indeed help them resist malaria — only that they are similar to ones in humans that we know do that job. Evolutionary similarities aren’t certain to work biologically the same between two species.
Even so, the research group took several steps to ensure they were capturing genetic differences from a wide variety of chimps. That started with gathering a lot of poop — necessary to obtain DNA from the elusive animals without bothering them.
That effort involved samples from 828 wild chimpanzees from 30 chimp groups (including four subspecies) from a variety of geographic and ecological environments. The subsequent genetic analysis of the protein-producing parts of the chimps’ genomes, representing the largest such effort on the species to date.
The scientists compared the genetic information of chimps from different subspecies and environments and looked for variants that appeared more frequently in one environment versus another. For instance, they noticed that the forest chimps held differences in the genes associated with malaria resistance more so than other groups.
Read More: Chimps May Continuously Learn as They Age, a Factor of Human Evolution
Looking Both Forward and Backward
Besides looking forward to see how both chimps and humans might adapt to various challenges, the group also intends to look backward at how early humans demonstrated their own resilience.
“What can chimpanzee genetic adaptation to the woodland-savannah tell us about the potential adaptations experienced by early modern humans as they moved from the deep forests to woodlands and then savannah, during human origins?” says Andrés.
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