University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Comparative Genomics of Ape Plasmodium Parasites Reveals Key Evolutionary Events Leading to Human Malaria Sesh Alexander Sundararaman University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Evolution Commons, Genetics Commons, and the Microbiology Commons Recommended Citation Sundararaman, Sesh Alexander, "Comparative Genomics of Ape Plasmodium Parasites Reveals Key Evolutionary Events Leading to Human Malaria" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2046. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2046 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2046 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Comparative Genomics of Ape Plasmodium Parasites Reveals Key Evolutionary Events Leading to Human Malaria Abstract African great apes are infected with at least six species of P. falciparum-like parasites, including the ancestor of P. falciparum. Comparative studies of these parasites and P. falciparum (collectively termed the Laverania subgenus) will provide insight into the evolutionary origins of P. falciparum and identify genetic features that influence host tropism. Here we show that ape Laverania parasites do not serve as a recurrent source of human malaria and use novel enrichment techniques to derive near full-length genomes of close and distant relatives of P. falciparum. Using a combination of single template amplification and deep sequencing, we observe no evidence of ape Laverania infections in forest dwelling humans in Cameroon. This result supports previous findings that ape Laverania parasites are host specific and have successfully colonized humans only once. To understand the determinants of host specificity and identify genetic characteristics unique to P.