Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasite and it is carried by mosquitoes. The most common species found in Africa Plasmodium falciparum causes perilous cerebral malaria. Researchers found that human can have initially caught malaria from gorillas. Up till now, it was believed that malaria parasite take a new direction from a chimpanzee parasite when humans and chimpanzees previous had a familiar ancestor.
The DNA from western gorilla parasites was analogous to human parasite. To study infections of DNA in wild apes, the research team gathered two thousand and seven hundred samples of fecal matter from western and eastern species gorilla. They also collected faecal matter of common chimpanzee called pygmy chimpanzees.
They attempt sequencing Plasmodium DNA from the faeces with methods that use a large sample and depict a genetic family tree to observe which parasites were related. When they did conservative sequencing, the tree did not make any sense because each sample contained a mixture of parasites, said Dr Beatrice Hahn from the University Of Birmingham, Alabama, US.
They thinned the DNA so that they had just one parasite’s genome symbolized in a single sample and then augmented the DNA from there. This way they were capable to divide the DNA from dissimilar species of the parasite much more effectively. They then established the tree made much more sense. But they also found some astonishing results.
The human Plasmodium was not very intimately connected to chimpanzee Plasmodium as had been believed but it was very intimately connected to one out of three species of gorilla Plasmodium from western gorillas in Central and West Africa. There was more hereditary diversity in the gorilla parasites than in human parasites, said Dr Hahn.
This means the gorilla is prone to be the derivation of the human parasite. Other studies have just looked at chimps, so did not find the gorilla parasite. Some studies have observed animals in caging. So it is possible any parasites have jumped from their human keepers, added Dr Hahn.