Orangutan Genetics: Begging for an Article

There are a couple of interesting articles on Orangutan genteics out. The first, published in Nature (and is open acess), announces the sequencing of the Orangutan genome. Results are kind of interesting. From Science Daily (I haven’t had a chance to read the Nature article yet):

However, in a surprising discovery, the researchers found that at least in some ways, the orangutan genome evolved more slowly than the genomes of humans and chimpanzees, which are about 99 percent similar.

“In terms of evolution, the orangutan genome is quite special among great apes in that it has been extraordinarily stable over the past 15 million years,” says senior author Richard K. Wilson, PhD, director of Washington University’s Genome Center, which led the project. “This compares with chimpanzees and humans, both of which have experienced large-scale structural rearrangements of their genome that may have accelerated their evolution.”

Know Your Primate: Pongo abelii

Order: Primates
Suborder: Haplorrhini
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Pongo
Species: Pongo abelii
Common Name: Sumatran Orangutan

The sumatran orang lives, obviously, in Sumatra – they are an endemic species. According several genetic analysis the Sumatran and Bornean populations diverged from each other about 1.5-1.7 MYA. They are largely frugivorous and spend most of their time in trees. On the ground they are quadrupedal. Unlike the chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla, they are not knuckle walkers they use their fist. Males tend to be solitary.