Introgression in hybrid zones among chimpanzee subspecies

In this project we explore how chimpanzee females were migrating. In another way, we tr y to understand how chimpanzee females were transporting new genetic mutations betw een different regions, and how this contributed to their adaptation to the environment. We do this by making use of chimpanzee specimens in natural history museums. Chimpanzees are one of the closest species to us, humans. Chimpanzees live in a patriarc hal society, where almost all the male members of the community are close relatives and females move out of the community. Most of the adult females of any community come from another community, often from far away, and they bring new mutations. Acquiring new mutations is very important for evolution, because it increases the genetic diversity i n the group, and can be useful when new challenges arise such as novel pathogens or c hanges in environment. It has been known that there are four distinct subspecies within chimpanzees: central, eastern, western and Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees. This means t hat at some point in the deep past chimpanzee communities split and started to mate wi thin their group, accumulating unique genetic changes. Much like humans and other ho minins such as Neanderthals, they were still sporadically mixing across subspecies, which means some chimpanzee females entered communities of other subspecies and enriched their genetic pool. Understanding how this process happened contributes to comprehen ding the nature of migration in chimpanzees. Since the natural habitat of chimpanzees has been rapidly getting smaller due to human activities, many communities in the wild have disappeared. For ethical reasons, it is almos t impossible to collect genetic material of good quality from the wild. But museum speci mens, which range from one or two hundred years to very recently, are a great alternativ e here. Using small parts of bones from museum specimens to generate data from their genomes is not invasive to living animals, and in some cases brings back individuals from communities which do not exist anymore nowadays. DNA decays after death, leading to very small DNA pieces with chemical and physical damages, or traces of the microbes gr owing on them, or humans who touched them in the past. Analysing historical DNA to the level of entire genomes from the skulls of these apes will be the goal of this project, and we will be able to address aforementioned questions.