Convergent paths to malaria host adaptation in humans and chimpanzees
Aida Andres will discuss how malaria has driven genetic adaptation in humans and chimpanzees, highlighting evidence that both species have independently evolved similar genetic resistance to the parasite.
Plasmodium is a phenomenal selective force in its hosts, including humans. Instances of genetic adaptation to malaria are among the clearest and strongest examples of adaptive processes in our species. Several loci have evolved under strong local positive selection where malaria is endemic, as genetic variants that protect against the pathogen have increased in frequency in the relevant populations. In this way, Plasmodium has shaped not only the health, but also the genomes of humans around the world. Interestingly, parallel processes appear to have taken place in chimpanzees. We recently sequenced and analysed the exomes of over 800 wild chimpanzees across their geographic and ecological range, obtained from non-invasive faecal samples. Genome-by-environment analyses provided evidence of the presence of local adaptation to habitat type, which, in the rainforest, appears to mediate adaptation to pathogens. Interestingly, some of the strongest signatures of adaptation are to malaria, with evidence of positive selection in the very same genes underlying resistance and adaptation to malaria in humans, suggesting convergent adaptive evolution in the two species. I will present these results, and some in humans, to discuss what they tell us about the possible paths of adaptation to this important parasite.
Speaker
Aida Andrés
Aida Andrés is an evolutionary population geneticist that investigates how populations evolve and adapt to their environment. She is Professor and Director of the UCL Genetics Institute (UGI), Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment (GEE). She is also a member of the Centre for Computational Biology and the Human Evolution at UCL Network.
She obtained her PhD from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) under the supervision of Prof. Jaume Bertranpetit. After two postdoctoral positions, at Cornell University (NY, USA) in the group of Prof. Andrew G. Clark and the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH (MD, USA) with Dr Eric Green, in 2010 she launched her research group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), under the direction of Prof. Svante Paabo.
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